On the analysis of non-coding roles in open source development

Abstract The role of non-coding contributors in Open Source Software (OSS) is poorly understood. Most current research around OSS development focuses on the coding aspects project (e.g., commits, pull requests or code reviews) while ignoring potential other types contributions. Often, due to assumption that these contributions are not significant number and that, any case, they handled by same people also part “coding team”. This paper aims investigate whether this actually case analyzing frequency diversity development. As a sample projects for our study we have taken 100 most popular ecosystem NPM, package manager JavaScript. Our results validate importance dedicated communities as, typically, contributor specializes specific subset roles. We foresee adopting explicit policies attract onboard them could see positive impact their long-term sustainability providing put place right governance strategies facilitate migration collaboration among different work, provide replicability further quantitative role-based analysis researchers.