Impact of stakeholder type and collaboration on issue resolution time in OSS Projects

Abstract

Born as a movement of collective contribution of volunteer developers, Open source software (OSS) attracts an increasing involvement of commercial firms. Many OSS projects are composed of a mix group of firm- paid and volunteer developers, with different motivation, collaboration practices and working styles. As OSS is collaborative work in nature, it is important to know whether these differences have an impact on project outcomes. In this paper, we empirically investigate the firm-paid participation in resolving OSS evolution issues, the stakeholder collaboration and its impact on OSS issue resolution time. The results suggest that though a firm-paid developer resolves much more issues than a volunteer developer does, there is no difference in issue resolution time between firm-paid and volunteer developers. Besides, the more important factor that influences the issue resolution time comes from the collaboration among stakeholders rather than from measures of individual characteristics.