Developer Turnover in Global, Industrial Open Source Projects: Insights from Applying Survival Analysis

Large open source software projects often have a globally distributed development team. Studies have shown developer turnover has a significant impact on the project success. Frequent developer turnover may lead to loss of productivity due to lacking relevant knowledge and spending extra time learning how projects work. Thus, lots of attention has been paid to which factors are related to developer retention, however, few of them focus on the impact of activities of individual developers. In this paper, we study five open source projects from different organizations and examine whether developer turnover is affected by when they start contributing and what types of contributions they are making. Our study reveals that developers have higher chances to survive in software projects when they 1) start contributing to the project earlier, 2) mainly modify instead of creating files, 3) mainly code instead of dealing with documentations. Our results also shed lights on the potential approaches to improving developer retention.