Refactoring from 9 to 5? What and when employees and volunteers contribute to OSS

• Main Authors: DIAS, Luiz Felipe, BARBOSA, Caio, PINTO, Gustavo, STEINMACHER, Igor, FONSECA, Baldoino, RIBEIRO, Márcio, TREUDE, Christoph, DA COSTA, Daniel Alencar
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: Employees; Open Source Software; Volunteers; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8909; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9912/viewcontent/vlhcc20.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In this paper we characterize the contributions made by employees (developers that work for GitHub, the company) and volunteers (developers that use GitHub, the platform) to OSS projects maintained by GitHub (the company) on GitHub (the platform). By mining activities performed in five well-known company-owned OSS projects, we investigate what they do and when they do it. We found that the majority of the volunteers' contributions are related to reengineering (e.g., refactoring), while employees focus more on management (e.g., documentation). When it comes to the working hours, we found that contributions are made mostly from 9am-5pm, even for the volunteers.