Radicality and the Open Source Development Model
Christopher Oezbek, Florian Thiel · 2010
Background: The Open Source development paradigm has matured sufficiently to give greater importance to questions on how to change the architecture and development processes of individual projects. Objective: We explore the abilities of Open Source projects to perform radical vs. incremental changes and suggest ways to improve them. Methods: We worked qualitatively and performed first a content analysis study of thirteen medium-scale Open Source projects. Using impression from this observational study we conducted an active case study with one large-scale Open Source project to achieve a radical change. Results: We found evidence that Open Source projects prefer incremental changes for software design and implementation as well as for the introduction of processes and tools. Our results include preliminary explanations for this preference such as legacy constraints and structural conservatism. Limitations: Further work is necessary to validate results widely and add a quantitative assessment to the results. Conclusions: We conclude that project leaders and innovators need to limit the radicality of the means to the goals they want to achieve in their projects, and give some advice on how to do so.