On the huge importance of non-tech roles in Open Source: Empirical study on NPM

On the huge importance of non-tech roles in Open Source: Empirical study on NPM

The role of non-tech/non-coding contributors in Open Source Software (OSS) is poorly understood. Most of current research around OSS development focuses on the coding aspects of the project (e.g., commits, pull requests or code reviews) while ignoring the potential of...
20+ tools to help you mine and analyze GitHub and Git data

20+ tools to help you mine and analyze GitHub and Git data

Any important decision should be grounded on data. This is also true for any decision that affects your software projects. You shouldn’t reach any conclusion regarding the health of your project or the actions to take to improve it without a good look at the...
Testing challenges for NLP-intensive bots

Testing challenges for NLP-intensive bots

The success of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has sparked substantial interest in the software engineering (SE) field to improve AI scalability and quality [1]. AI applications face common challenges in their SE processes [2]. Among those, they are hard to specify [3],...
Participation Inequality and the 90-9-1 Principle in Open Source

Participation Inequality and the 90-9-1 Principle in Open Source

Participation inequality is a major challenge in any shared-resource system. This is known as the “volunteer’s dilemma”: everybody wants to benefit from a resource without contributing, expecting others will do the work. We set out ot explore whether this problem also...
The Role of Foundations in Open Source Projects

The Role of Foundations in Open Source Projects

In the last years, a number of Open-Source Systems (OSS) have created parallel foundations, as legal instruments to better articulate the structure, collaboration, and financial model for the project. Some examples are Apache, Linux, Mozilla, Eclipse or Django...