Title: Unveiling the (Not So) Secret Life of Elite Open Source Developers
Time：     13:30-14:30, October14 Monday,2019
Location:   Room 1002, Science Building B
Lecturer：Yi WANG (Assistant Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology) 

Abstract:
Open source developers, particularly the elite developers, maintain a diverse portfolio of contributing activities. They do not only commit source code but also spend a significant amount of effort on other communicative, organizational, and supportive activities. However, almost all prior literature focuses on a limited number of specific activities and fails to analyze elite developers' activities in a comprehensive way. In this talk, I will introduce two our recent studies focusing on developing understandings on elite developers’ activities and their effort allocations’ impacts on project productivity and quality. Study 1 used fine-grained event data from 20 large open source projects hosted on GitHub. Our analyses revealed: (1) elite developers participate in a variety of activities while technical contributions (e.g., coding) account for a small proportion only; (2) the participation of elite developers in non-technical activities is negatively associated with the project's outcomes in term of productivity and software quality. In Study 2, we extended our focus from the single project level to the open source ecosystem level. We investigated five open source ecosystems (AWS, Eclipse, Firefox Add-ons, npm/Node.js, and Python Data Science) using over 60 representative projects. We found that elite developers’ activities’ impacts on productivity and quality are subjected to the ecosystems they belong to. 

Introduction of Lectuer:
Dr. Yi Wang is an assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Before joining RIT in 2017, he was a research staff member at IBM Research-Almaden. In 2015, He obtained his Ph.D. in information and computer science from University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on human and social aspect of software engineering, as well as broader collaboration and coordination in distributed teams. His research appears on top journals such as TOSEM, EMSE, and top conferences such as ASE, CSCW, ICSE. He is a Principal Investigator of multiple National Science Foundation grants. He is a member of ACM and IEEE.