Will You Come Back to Contribute? Investigating the Inactivity of OSS Core Developers in GitHub
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Several Open Source Software (OSS) projects depend on the continuity of their development communities to remain sustainable. Understanding how developers become inactive or why they take breaks can help communities prevent abandonment and incentivize developers to come back. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify developers' inactive periods by analyzing the individual rhythm of contributions to the projects. Using this method, we quantitatively analyze the inactivity of core developers in 18 OSS organizations hosted on GitHub. We also survey core developers to receive their feedback about the identified breaks and transitions. Our results show that our method was effective for identifying developers' breaks. About 94 surveyed core developers agreed with our state model of inactivity; 71 of them acknowledged their breaks and state transition, respectively. We also show that all core developers take breaks (at least once) and about a half of them ( 45 We also analyzed the probability of transitions to/from inactivity and found that developers who pause their activity have a 35-55% chance to return to an active state; yet, if the break lasts for a year or longer, then the probability of resuming activities drops to 21-26 complete disengagement. These results may support the creation of policies and mechanisms to make OSS community managers aware of breaks and potential project abandonment.
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