TY - GEN
T1 - A characterization study of testing contributors and their contributions in open source projects
AU - Souza, Hugo Henrique Fumero De
AU - Wiese, Igor
AU - Steinmacher, Igor
AU - Ré, Reginaldo
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 ACM.
PY - 2022/10/5
Y1 - 2022/10/5
N2 - Even though open source projects have some different characteristics from projects in the industry, the commitment of maintainers and contributors to achieve a high level of software quality is constant. Therefore, tests are among the main practices of the communities. Thus, motivating contributors to write new tests and maintain regression tests during testing activities is essential for the project's health. The objective of our work is to characterize testers and their contributions to open source projects as part of a broad study about testers' motivation. Thus, we conducted a study with 3,936 repositories and 7 different and important programming languages (C, C++, C#, Java, Javascript, Python, and Ruby), analyzing a total of 4,409,142 contributions to classify contributing members and their contributions. Our results show that test-only contributors exist, regardless of programming language or project. We conclude that, despite the unfavorable scenario, there are contributors who feel motivated and dedicate their time and effort to contribute to new tests or to the evolution of existing tests.
AB - Even though open source projects have some different characteristics from projects in the industry, the commitment of maintainers and contributors to achieve a high level of software quality is constant. Therefore, tests are among the main practices of the communities. Thus, motivating contributors to write new tests and maintain regression tests during testing activities is essential for the project's health. The objective of our work is to characterize testers and their contributions to open source projects as part of a broad study about testers' motivation. Thus, we conducted a study with 3,936 repositories and 7 different and important programming languages (C, C++, C#, Java, Javascript, Python, and Ruby), analyzing a total of 4,409,142 contributions to classify contributing members and their contributions. Our results show that test-only contributors exist, regardless of programming language or project. We conclude that, despite the unfavorable scenario, there are contributors who feel motivated and dedicate their time and effort to contribute to new tests or to the evolution of existing tests.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85139116142&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85139116142&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3555228.3555244
DO - 10.1145/3555228.3555244
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
SP - 95
EP - 105
BT - CBSOFT 2022 - 13th Congresso Brasileiro de Software; Proceedings - 36th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2022
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 36th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2022
Y2 - 5 October 2022
ER -