[gentoo-project] You have been researched (again)

[Jeroen Roovers]

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 David Garcia, Marcelo Serrano Zanetti and Frank Schweitzer
Chair of Systems Design – www.sg.ethz.ch – ETH Zurich


 = Abstract

We analyze the relation between the emotions and the activity of
contributors in the Open Source Software project Gentoo. Our case study
builds on extensive data sets from the project’s bug tracking platform
bugzilla, to quantify the activity of contributors, and its mail
archives, to quantify the emotions of contributors by means of
sentiment analysis. The Gentoo project is known for a considerable drop
in development performance after the sudden retirement of a central
contributor. We analyze how this event correlates with the negative
emotions, both in bilateral email discussions with the central
contributor, and at the level of the whole community of contributors.
We then extend our study to consider the activity patters on Gentoo
contributors in general. We find that contributors are more likely to
become inactive when they express strong positive or negative emotions
in the bug tracker, or when they deviate from the expected value of
emotions in the mailing list. We use these insights to develop a
Bayesian classifier that detects the risk of contributors leaving the
project. Our analysis opens new perspectives for measuring online
contributor motivation by means of sentiment analysis and for real-time
predictions of contributor turnover in Open Source Software projects.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3612


Merry reading,
     jer