An Analysis of the Impact of Donation Badges on Response Time in Eclipse Bug Tracking System
中才 恵太朗 (1651080)
Managing an effective donation program has become crucial for sustainable open source software projects.
These projects commonly offer several benefits to attract donations.
Eclipse, one such open source software project, acknowledges its donors by presenting donation badges in its issue tracking system called Bugzilla. However, its rewarding effect is currently unknown.
Using the Bugzilla activity data, we applied a framework of causal inference to investigate relative promptness of developer response to bug reports with donation badges compared with bug reports without the badges.
We estimated that donation badges decrease developer response time by about two hours in median.
Our findings suggest that the appearance of donation badges is beneficial on the part of the donors at least eliciting prompt developer responses. We conducted a survey on Eclipse contributors about donation badges. The reason for fast response is the donation badges recognized the friendly member by community member.