Modeling success in FLOSS project groups
PROMISE '09 Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Predictor Models in Software Engineering
Proceedings of the 4th India Software Engineering Conference
Supporting the cooperation of end-user programmers through social development environments
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering
Information Quality in Wikipedia: The Effects of Group Composition and Task Conflict
Journal of Management Information Systems
Free/Libre open-source software development: What we know and what we do not know
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
How Peripheral Developers Contribute to Open-Source Software Development
Information Systems Research
Characterizing key developers: a case study with apache ant
CRIWG'12 Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Collaboration and Technology
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
The true role of active communicators: an empirical study of Jazz core developers
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
Creating a model of the dynamics of socio-technical groups
User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction
Hi-index | 0.00 |
The concept of the core group of developers is important and often discussed in empirical studies of FLOSS projects. This paper examines the question, "how does one empirically distinguish the core?" Being able to identify the core members of a FLOSS development project is important because many of the processes necessary for successful projects likely involve core members differently than peripheral members, so analyses that mix the two groups will likely yield invalid results. We compare 3 analysis approaches to identify the core: the named list of developers, a Bradford's law analysis that takes as the core the most frequent contributors and a social network analysis of the interaction pattern that identifies the core in a core-and-periphery structure. We apply these measures to the interactions around bug fixing for 116 SourceForge projects. The 3 techniques identify different individuals as core members; examination of which individuals are identified leads to suggestions for refining the measures. All 3 measures though suggest that the core of FLOSS projects is a small fraction of the total number of contributors.