The Economics of Community Open Source Software Projects: An Empirical Analysis of Maintenance Effort

Capra, Eugenio; Francalanci, Chiara; Merlo, Francesco

doi:10.1155/2010/685950

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 48 publications

(99 reference statements)

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“…According to Capra et al [13,14,15], FOSS shows a slower growth of maintenance effort over time. Studies by Koch et al [29,27,28] on effort modelling and developer participation in FOSS projects show that the number of participants, other than programmers, was about one order of magnitude larger than the number of programmers.…”

Section: Applicability Of Traditional Effort Estimation Techniques To...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Development Effort Estimation in Free/Open Source Software from Activity in Version Control Systems

Robles¹,

Capiluppi²,

González-Barahona³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Effort estimation models are a fundamental tool in software management, and used as a forecast for resources, constraints and costs associated to software development. For Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, effort estimation is especially complex: professional developers work alongside occasional, volunteer developers, so the overall effort (in person-months) becomes non-trivial to determine.The objective of this work it to develop a simple effort estimation model for FOSS projects, based on the historic data of developers' effort. The model is fed with direct developer feedback to ensure its accuracy.After extracting the personal development profiles of several thousands of developers from 6 large FOSS projects, we asked them to fill in a questionnaire to determine if they should be considered as full-time developers in the project that they work in. Their feedback was used to fine-tune the value of an effort threshold, above which developers can be considered as full-time.With the help of the over 1,000 questionnaires received, we were able to determine, for every project in our sample, the threshold of commits that separates full-time from non-full-time developers.We finally offer guidelines and a tool to apply our model to FOSS projects that use a version control system.

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Section: Applicability Of Traditional Effort Estimation Techniques To...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Development Effort Estimation in Free/Open Source Software from Activity in Version Control Systems

Robles¹,

Capiluppi²,

González-Barahona³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…According to Capra et al (2007), Capra et al (2008), andCapra et al (2010), FOSS shows a slower growth of maintenance effort over time. Studies by Koch and Schneider (2002), Koch (2004), andKoch (2008) on effort modelling and developer participation in FOSS projects show that the number of participants, other than programmers, was about one order of magnitude larger than the number of programmers.…”

Section: Applicability Of Traditional Effort Estimation Techniques To...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Development effort estimation in free/open source software from activity in version control systems

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Effort estimation models are a fundamental tool in software management, and used as a forecast for resources, constraints and costs associated to software development. For Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, effort estimation is especially complex: professional developers work alongside occasional, volunteer developers, so the overall effort (in person-months) becomes non-trivial to determine. The objective of this work it to develop a simple effort estimation model for FOSS projects, based on the historic data of developers’ effort. The model is fed with direct developer feedback to ensure its accuracy. After extracting the personal development profiles of several thousands of developers from 6 large FOSS projects, we asked them to fill in a questionnaire to determine if they should be considered as full-time developers in the project that they work in. Their feedback was used to fine-tune the value of an effort threshold, above which developers can be considered as full-time. With the help of the over 1,000 questionnaires received, we were able to determine, for every project in our sample, the threshold of commits that separates full-time from non-full-time developers. We finally offer guidelines and a tool to apply our model to FOSS projects that use a version control system.

show abstract

“…In this sense, Capra et al discuss and investigate empirically how governance, process and design quality affect development effort in FOSS projects [7]. In [8] evidence is shown that in FOSS projects the maintenance effort is lower than in industrial projects due to the fact that they are less prone to software decay.…”

Section: Related Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating development effort in Free/Open source software projects by mining software repositories: a case study of OpenStack

Robles

González-Barahona

Cervigón

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

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Because of the distributed and collaborative nature of free / open source software (FOSS) projects, the development effort invested in a project is usually unknown, even after the software has been released. However, this information is becoming of major interest, especially -but not onlybecause of the growth in the number of companies for which FOSS has become relevant for their business strategy. In this paper we present a novel approach to estimate effort by considering data from source code management repositories. We apply our model to the OpenStack project, a FOSS project with more than 1,000 authors, in which several tens of companies cooperate. Based on data from its repositories and together with the input from a survey answered by more than 100 developers, we show that the model offers a simple, but sound way of obtaining software development estimations with bounded margins of error.

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The Economics of Community Open Source Software Projects: An Empirical Analysis of Maintenance Effort

Cited by 7 publications

References 48 publications

Development Effort Estimation in Free/Open Source Software from Activity in Version Control Systems

Development Effort Estimation in Free/Open Source Software from Activity in Version Control Systems

Development effort estimation in free/open source software from activity in version control systems

Estimating development effort in Free/Open source software projects by mining software repositories: a case study of OpenStack

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