An Empirical Study of the Impact of COVID-19 on OSS Development

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we propose an analytical model that can analyze the impact of emergencies on open source software (OSS) development. As the core of this model, a metric system is used to comprehensively describe the OSS development process, which includes three dimensions team activity, development activity, and development risk, with a total of 30 metrics. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the model, we construct an empirical study analyzing the impact of COVID-19 on OSS development. This study is based on the development process events between January 2019 and April 2022 belonging to 50 selected open source projects on GitHub. The results show that more than 72.4% of projects were negatively impacted following the COVID-19 outbreak. Interestingly, we observe that variants of covide-19 did not exacerbate its impact on software development. On the contrary, some project development activities have obviously resumed, indicating that the development team has adapted and gradually got rid of the impact of the epidemic. © 2022 IEEE.