CDBA Research Seminar: Chintan Amrit
Seminar Title: A Theory-Grounded Recommender System for Open Source Developer Retention
Abstract: The growing popularity of Open Source Software (OSS) has attracted millions of developers to social coding platforms such as GitHub.com. However, OSS is becoming a victim of its own success, because finding a suitable project, among millions of projects hosted on social coding platforms is a grueling task for developers. This misalignment between developers and projects often leads to high developer turnover and project failures. In pursuit of more effective algorithms that can both attract and retain new developers, we adopt a holistic perspective on long-term motivational theory driving participation in OSS and show how this can be integrated in a preference matching algorithm recommending OSS projects to new developers. We leverage social, technical and socio-technical dimensions of developer activity and draw upon the concept of integrated membership established in Legitimate Peripheral Participation theory to extract developer preferences that associate to long-term productivity outcomes. Hence, this paper presents an artifact to recommend OSS projects to developers that builds upon the idea of learning from the integrated developers of a community, through modeling of social, technical and socio-technical activities as implicit indicators of direct shared topical interest and long-term situated learning potential. Evaluation using real-world GitHub data demonstrates that the recommendations produced by our artifact are associated with substantial long-term productivity gains among newly onboarded developers.
Bio: Chintan Amrit is an associate professor at the Department of Business Analytics, University of Amsterdam, where he is the program director of the Business Information Technology Management Master program. He has completed his PhD from the University of Twente in the area of coordination in software development. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His research interests are in the area of business intelligence (using machine learning), open-source development and mining software repositories, and applying analytics in projects that focus on the UN’s sustainable development goals. He has published over 100 research articles and serves as a department editor of IEEE Transactions in Engineering Management, coordinating editor of Information Systems Frontiers journal, an associate editor of PeerJ Computer Science journal, and he will be the General Chair of the IFIP 8.3 conference in 2028.
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