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Dual Channel Among Task and Contribution on OSS Communities: An Empirical Study

Open Source Software (OSS) community has attracted a large number of distributed developers to work together, e.g. reporting and discussing issues as well as submitting and reviewing code. OSS developers create links among development units (e.g. issues and pull requests in GitHub), share their opinions and promote the resolution of development units. Although previous work has examined the role of links in recommending high-priority tasks and reducing resource waste, the understanding of the actual usage of links in practice is still limited. To address the research gap, we conduct an empirical study based on the 5W1H model and data mining from five popular OSS projects on GitHub. We find that links originating from a PR are more common than the other three types of links, and links are more frequently created in Documentation. We also find that average duration between development units’ create time in a link is half a year. We observed that link behaviors are very complex and the duration of link increases with the complexity of link structure. We also observe that the reasons of link are very different, especially in P–P and I–I. Finally, future works are discussed in conclusion.