Profiling an Open Source Project Ecology and Its Programmers

Effort modeling and programmer participation in open source software projects

“…The vast majority of projects have only a very small number of programmers (67.5 per cent have only 1 programmer), only 1.3 per cent have more than 10 programmers. This number of programmers can be shown to follow a power law (or Pareto or Zipf) distribution (Koch, 2004), like Hunt and Johnson (2002) have also found for the number of downloads of projects. These numbers also correspond to the findings of Krishnamurthy (2002), who showed that most of the projects had only a small number of participants (median of 4).…”

“…While the differences between the decentralized open source process and traditional software engineering practices have been debated (Bollinger et al, 1999;McConnell, 1999;Vixie, 1999), and also quantitative studies of development projects and communities have been undertaken (Dempsey et al, 2002;Dinh-Trong & Bieman, 2005;Ghosh & Prakash, 2000;Koch & Schneider, 2002;Koch, 2004;Krishnamurthy, 2002;Mockus et al, 2000Mockus et al, , 2002, some points remain to be explored. One of the most important questions remaining is the effort for developing open source software, which is not known even to the leaders of the respective project, and thus the efficiency of this model.…”

“…The work on effort estimation on open source software development project has to date been very limited (Koch & Schneider, 2002;Koch, 2004;Wheeler, 2005;Gonzalez-Barahona et al, 2004), and for the most part applied only very basic models like original COCOMO (Boehm, 1981) without further discussion or analysis.…”

Conceptual Modelling as a New Entry in the Bazaar: The Open Model Approach

“…These positions will be filled by people who have demonstrated long-term and high quality commitment, so that their authority is accepted by the others. As empirical research on open source software development teams has shown, in most projects a small inner group forms [25,19], surrounded by a larger number of contributors, and an even greater number of participants not directly involved in programming, but other tasks like bug reporting. A similar structure might appear in an open model project.…”

Evolutionary Software Requirements Factors and their Effect on Open Source Project Attractiveness

“…Open source projects need to attract users and developers to keep a project active and successful [33][34][35][36]. Important success factors include, developer motivation and interest [37][38][39][40][41][42], and user interest [43].…”