Open source developers, particularly the elite developers who own the administrative privileges for a project, maintain a diverse portfolio of contributing activities. They not only commit source code but also exert significant efforts on other communicative, organizational, and supportive activities. However, almost all prior research focuses on specific activities and fails to analyze elite developers’ activities in a comprehensive way. To bridge this gap, we conduct an empirical study with fine-grained event data from 20 large open source projects hosted on G IT H UB . We investigate elite developers’ contributing activities and their impacts on project outcomes. Our analyses reveal three key findings: (1) elite developers participate in a variety of activities, of which technical contributions (e.g., coding) only account for a small proportion; (2) as the project grows, elite developers tend to put more effort into supportive and communicative activities and less effort into coding; and (3) elite developers’ efforts in nontechnical activities are negatively correlated with the project’s outcomes in terms of productivity and quality in general, except for a positive correlation with the bug fix rate (a quality indicator). These results provide an integrated view of elite developers’ activities and can inform an individual’s decision making about effort allocation, which could lead to improved project outcomes. The results also provide implications for supporting these elite developers.

中文翻译：

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揭秘精英开发者在开源项目中的活动

开源开发人员，尤其是拥有项目管理权限的精英开发人员，维护着多样化的贡献活动组合。他们不仅提交源代码，而且还在其他交流、组织和支持活动上付出了巨大的努力。然而，几乎所有先前的研究都集中在特定的活动上，未能全面分析精英开发人员的活动。为了弥补这一差距，我们对 G 上托管的 20 个大型开源项目的细粒度事件数据进行了实证研究它HUB. 我们调查精英开发人员的贡献活动及其对项目成果的影响。我们的分析揭示了三个关键发现：（1）精英开发人员参与了各种活动，其中技术贡献（例如编码）仅占一小部分；（2）随着项目的发展，精英开发人员倾向于将更多的精力投入到支持和交流活动中，而较少投入到编码上；(3) 精英开发人员在非技术活动中的努力在生产力和质量方面总体上与项目成果呈负相关，除了与错误修复率（质量指标）呈正相关。这些结果提供了精英开发人员活动的综合视图，可以为个人的工作分配决策提供信息，这可能会导致项目成果的改善。