An exploratory study of open source software development team structure (original) (raw)
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Analysis of the core team role in open source communities
Proceedings of the International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems, CISIS 2011, 2011
Open source software represents a new paradigm of software development based on a subjacent community. It is widely accepted in the literature the layered structure of open source communities, being the core group the most active contributors usually located at the center of the community. The tasks of this group include not only an intense activity in terms of contributions but also to promote participation among the rest of the community members. In this paper, the general role of this group is analyzed by modeling communities as Social Networks and applying Social Network Analysis techniques. Findings related their brokerage activity with open source software success.
Collaboration in Open-Source Projects: Myth or Reality?
One of the fundamental principles of open-source projects is that they foster collaboration among developers, disregarding their geographical location or personal background. When it comes to software repositories collaboration is a rather ephemeral phenomenon which lacks a clear definition, and it must therefore be mined and modeled. This throws up the question whether what is mined actually maps to reality. In this paper we investigate collaboration by modeling it using a number of diverse approaches that we then compare to a ground truth obtained by surveying a substantial set of developers of the Pharo open-source community. Our findings indicate that the notion of collaboration must be revisited, as it is undermined by a number of factors that are often tackled in imprecise ways or not taken into account at all.
2006
There are many reasons why an organisation should consider adopting distributed development of software systems and applications, including access to a larger labour pool and a broader skills base, cost advantages, and round the clock working. However, distributed development presents many challenges stemming from the complexity of maintaining good communication, coordination and control when teams are dispersed in time (e.g. across time zones) and space, as well as socioculturally. The open source software (OSS) development model is distributed by nature, and many OSS developments are considered success stories. The question therefore arises of whether traditional distributed development models can be improved by transfer of successful practice from OSS development models. In this paper we compare OSS with traditional distributed development models using a framework-based analysis of the extant literature. From our analysis we find that the advantages of temporal and geographical distance dominate in OSS, rather than their associated problems. Further, socio-cultural distance is lowered by active developer selection. However, there is a challenge to satisfying project goals when personal goals dominate.
Understanding the nature of collaboration in open-source software development
… Conference, 2005. APSEC' …, 2005
Our approach to better understand the nature of collaboration in open-source software (OSS) development is to view it as a participative system, where people and artifacts are inter-connected via a computational infrastructure demonstrating a sociotechnical system. This paper presents a framework we have developed to describe a participative system, and describe our hypothesis that the framework is capable of characterizing the evolution of an OSS community through changing the participants' perceived value and types of engagement. We report a preliminary result of our case study on the GIMP development mailing list as an initial step to test this hypothesis.
While researchers are becoming increasingly interested in studying OSS phenomenon, there is still a small number of studies analyzing larger samples of projects investigating the structure of activities among OSS developers. The significant amount of information that has been gathered in the publicly available open-source software repositories and mailing-list archives offers an opportunity to analyze projects structures and participant involvement. In this article, using on commits data from 263 Apache projects repositories (nearly all), we show that although OSS development is often described as collaborative, but it in fact predominantly relies on radically solitary input and individual, non-collaborative contributions. We also show, in the first published study of this magnitude, that the engagement of contributors is based on a power-law distribution.