An Exploratory Study of Open Source Software Development Team Structure
Kevin Crowston, Barbara Scozzi, Salvatore Buonocore · 2003
We examine the structure of Open Source Software (OSS) development teams as part of a project on success factors for distributed work teams. Several authors have described OSS teams as having a hierarchical structure: a small team of core developers who oversee the development and contribute most of the code, a larger group of co-developers who contribute sporadically by reviewing or modifying code or by contributing bug fixes, and an even larger group of active users who contribute bug reports, but not code. The contributions of active users are hypothesized to be important to the success of OSS projects. The goal of this project is to determine how well this model applies to a wider range of OSS projects by examining participation in the software bug fixing process. The bug fixing process was studied by inductively coding the steps involved in fixing various bugs as recorded in the SourceForge bug tracking system. We hypothesized that different groups of developers could be distinguished by the type and level of participation in the process and that more successful projects would have larger active user groups. A preliminary pilot study of two OSS projects suggests that the approach is workable.