Trust Perceptions of Metadata in Open-Source Software: The Role of Performance and Reputation

Abstract

Open-source software (OSS) is a key aspect of software creation. However, little is known about programmers’ decisions to trust software from OSS websites. The current study emulated OSS websites and manipulated reputation and performance factors in the stimuli according to the heuristic-systematic processing model. We sampled professional programmers—with a minimum experience of three years—from Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 38). We used a 3 × 3 within-subjects design to investigate the relationship between OSS reputation and performance on users’ time spent on code, the number of interface clicks, trustworthiness perceptions, and willingness to use OSS code. We found that participants spent more time on and clicked the interface more often for code that was high in reputation. Meta-information included with OSS tools was found to affect the degree to which computer programmers interact with and perceive online code repositories. Furthermore, participants reported higher levels of perceived trustworthiness in and trust toward highly reputable OSS code. Notably, we observed fewer significant main effects for the performance manipulation, which may correspond to participants considering performance attributes mainly within the context of reputation-relevant information. That is, the degree to which programmers investigate and then trust OSS code may depend on the initial reputation ratings.

Trustworthy Transparency by Design

“…To improve trust in this dimension, a reputable or well-known (third) party can be made responsible for the development and operation of the transparency-enabling systems or certify their correctness, thereby targeting the trust antecedents of reputation and familiarity [21,31,53]. Alternatively, the use of open source software or code audits can reduce dependence on interpersonal trust [4,42,94].…”

“…The code for all components of the transparency toolchain and exemplary implementations of the Monitor is available on GitHub 4 and licensed with the permissive MIT open source license. 5 We want to allow anyone to scrutinize it and, of course, utilize it for their own instantiation of the transparency framework.…”

Using Eye-Tracking Data to Compare Differences in Code Comprehension and Code Perceptions between Expert and Novice Programmers

“…Those factors are perceived code performance, transparency, and reputation. Several empirical studies have been conducted to examine how these factors influence programmers' trustworthiness perceptions (e.g., [11][12][13]). In addition to trust in the code, whether programmers choose to reuse code can indicate their understanding of that code.…”

New Developer Metrics for Open Source Software Development Challenges: An Empirical Study of Project Recommendation Systems

“…The activities of developers in platforms such as GitHub provide collaboration, learning, and reputation management in the community [9]. These activities are the metadata of the platforms which directly correlated to reputation or performance of the developers [10]. Besides, the developer metrics are also created from these activities.…”