The dynamics of leadership and success in software development teams
Lorenzo Betti, Luca Gallo, Johannes Wachs, Federico Battiston · Nature Communications · 2025
From science to industry, teamwork plays a crucial role in knowledge production and innovation. Most studies consider teams as static groups of individuals, thereby failing to capture how the micro-dynamics of collaborative processes and organizational changes determine team success. Here, we leverage fine-grained temporal data on software development teams from three software ecosystems – Rust, JavaScript, and Python – to gain insights into the dynamics of online collaborative projects. Our analysis reveals an uneven workload distribution in teams, with stronger heterogeneity correlated with higher success, and the early emergence of a lead developer carrying out the majority of work. Moreover, we find that a sizeable fraction of projects experience a change of lead developer, with such a transition being more likely in projects led by inexperienced users. Finally, we show that leadership change is associated with faster success growth. Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of the link between team evolution and success in collaborative processes. Understanding how team dynamics impact performance in collaborative environments remains an open question. Here, authors use fine-grained activity data from software projects to characterize team evolution, showing how team-level changes unfold and how leadership change links to greater success.