Week 8 - Classifying Developers

On the Topic of Developers

On an open source project, many people have a hand in the final product that is delivered. One of our goals for this project was to classify the level of involvement for each person and put them into categories based on how it was that they contributed to the project. We have come up with four categories, listed below. These categories are not disjoint, meaning that one person can belong to any number of the categories:

• Developers = any person who is working on the chromium project, by either pushing code, verifying bugs, reviewing code for others, etc.
• Reviewers = any person who was asked to look over and code review for someone else and express their opinion. Each review has a set of reviewers listed on the left hand side of the screen
• Participants = anyone who touched a review at all. This includes people who were asked to review, people who were CCed on a review, and people who decided to input their opinion on a review despite not being asked.
• Contributors = someone who made a “significant” addition to the review. In this case we define significant as a comment or message on a review with more than 20 characters of “original” text. (Original meaning of your own thought, not a quote you are referencing).

The Venn Diagram below shows how these groups fit together in the grand scheme of developers. It explains how the categories overlap. It would be interesting in the future to populated this Venn Diagram with real developers. Then you could see which category is most popular, and which method of contribution is most used.

This project is sponsored by the Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates, funded by the National Science Foundation.