Jiayuan’s paper “Studying the Association between Bountysource Bounties and the Issue-addressing Likelihood of GitHub Issue Reports” was accepted for publication in the EMSE journal! Super congrats Jiayuan!
Abstract:
Due to the voluntary nature of open source software, it can be hard to find a developer to work on a particular task. For
example, some issue reports may be too cumbersome and unexciting for someone to volunteer to do them, yet these issue reports
may be of high priority to the success of a project. To provide an incentive for implementing such issue reports, one can propose a
monetary reward, i.e., a bounty, to the developer who completes that particular task. In this paper, we study bounties in open source
projects on GitHub to better understand how bounties can be leveraged to evolve such projects in terms of addressing issue reports.
We investigated 5,445 bounties for GitHub projects. These bounties were proposed through the Bountysource platform with a total
bounty value of $406,425. We find that 1) in general, the timing of proposing bounties is the most important factor that is associated
with the likelihood of an issue being addressed. More specifically, issue reports are more likely to be addressed if they are for projects
in which bounties are used more frequently and if they are proposed earlier. 2) The bounty value of an issue report is the most
important factor that is associated with the issue-addressing likelihood in the projects in which no bounties were used before. 3) There
is a risk of wasting money for backers who invest money on long-standing issue reports.
See our Publications for the full paper.