Analytics Dashboards and User Behavior: Evidence from GitHub
38 Pages Posted:
Date Written: January 10, 2025
Abstract
Open-source software (OSS) development is a social phenomenon, centered around connecting, collaborating, and comparing with other developers. To showcase their abilities and track their performance, developers maintain public user profiles that display detailed information about their OSS activities. In this paper, we examine how the adoption of an analytics dashboard that publicly displays performance information influences developers' contribution behavior - specifically, the quantity, effort, and diversity of their code contributions - as well as the developers' affect. Our empirical strategy is difference-in-differences using granular data from more than 60,000 GitHub developers over three years. The results indicate that the adoption of the analytics dashboard has heterogeneous effects on developers' behavior. High-activity developers benefit from the quantification and comparison of their work, becoming more active, particularly in collaborative projects. In contrast, low-activity developers exhibit different patterns. they increase their contributions mainly within the "safe space" of their own projects, but their commits are often accompanied by more negative messages. We present suggestive evidence that this increased negativity is linked to stress because it only occurs during peripheral and bothersome OSS activities, such as dependency handling. Our results show that public performance information may be a double-edged sword: although it can drive performance improvements, it may also impose psychological strain on developers. We discuss implications for theory and practice.
Keywords: analytics dashboard, open-source software, developer, user behavior
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