The processes of joining in global distributed software projects

Abstract

Libre (free / open source) software is a good example of global software development. Thousands of projects, in a wide range of domains which involve hundreds of thousands of developers and contributors from all around the world. Some large (both in size and developer community) libre software projects have shown evidence of producing code with complete functionality and fast evolution (with linear or superlinear growth), while maintaining low defect density. Many companies are exploring how to benefit from this situation, considering several approaches related to libre software development. For instance, some of them have hired full-time developers, focusing their work on some libre software projects they consider strategic.However, before joining the core development team of the project, these hired developers have to follow a process of software comprehension, and get used to the rules and communication mechanisms used in the project. We were interested in the differences between this case and that of volunteer developers working in the same project, Therefore, we studied the duration and basic characteristics of this joining process for the developers of GNOME (a well known, large, libre software project). In our analysis, we have found two groups with clearly different joining patterns. Moreover, we have related those patterns to the different behaviors of volunteer and hired developers: volunteers tend to follow a step-by-step joining process, while hired developers usually experience a "sudden" integration. Some reasons for this different behavior are also discussed.

The Mirroring Hypothesis: Theory, Evidence and Exceptions

“…In fact, four studies in our sample found that open-source projects had lower cognitive complexity and were more modular than proprietary projects (Herraiz et al, 2006;MacCormack et al, , 2008Baldwin et al, 2014). However, three other studies found no evidence of strict partitioning within codebases nor any correspondence between identifiable organizational groups and specific modules (Bird et al, 2008;Bowman and Holt, 1998;Gutwin et al, 2004).…”

Social Activities Rival Patch Submission for Prediction of Developer Initiation in OSS Projects

“…Herraiz et al found that apart from gradual progression, there is another common developer joining pattern, viz., the quick initiation of employees of enterprises invested in that OSS project as new developers [15]. Shibuya and Tamai performed case studies and confirmed these findings on other OSS projects (GNOME, OpenOffice.org, MySQL) [16].…”

Dynamics of innovation in an "open source" collaboration environment: lurking, laboring, and launching FLOSS projects on SourceForge

“…In a still more recent case study focusing on GNOME, 12 Herraiz et al (2006) also ask whether the conventional dynamic interpretation of the onion model is a good representation of the joining process, and seek answers by estimating the distribution of transit times between developers' first instances of performing characteristic tasks in the onion's successive layers. Although it is typical for individuals in the GNOME community to have contacted the project by email before beginning to commit code 13 , conventional suppositions regarding the next step in the sequence are violated by most of the GNOME developers' behaviors: for example, they often commit to the project's CVS before sending their first bug report.…”