Developers' Collaboration Behaviors and Success of Open Source Projects

[Objective] This study investigates the relationship between the success of open source projects and collaborative development behaviors. [Methods] Firstly, we retrieved Apache project data from GitHub to quantify successful projects and collaborative development behaviors. Then, we examined the correlations between behavioral characteristics and success with regression analysis. [Results] We found the impacts or Exp(B) of proportion of core members, frequency of code submission, and the average number of file modifications on the technically successful projects, were 0.037, 1.427 and 0.327. For the impacts of same characteristics on the commercially successful projects, the standard coefficient were -0.426, 0.221, and 0.195. [Limitations] The distribution of samples and the influencing factors need some revisions. [Conclusions] This paper provides new directions for the management of successful open source software projects. © 2019 The Author(s).