Does Routine Order Variation and Bot Usage Spur Resilience in Open Source Communities?

Abstract

Resilience is important for Open Source Software Development (OSSD) teams to overcome software development challenges that commonly occur in the platforms as a result of unexpected events such as natural disasters, cyber-attacks, pandemics etc., As OSSD teams primarily rely on voluntary contributions, any type of disruptions to the routines of open source workers can lead to loss of productivity and cause delays in open software production and release cycles. Currently we do not have sufficient understanding about how OSSD teams bounce back from a disruption and become resilient. To understand the effects of disruption we chose a popular open source community, called Kubernetes, to understand the resilience process in OSSD teams. We collected data from an exemplar event of COVID-19 pandemic to understand how Kubernetes community became resilient after the unprecedented announcement of the global pandemic by World Health Organization (WHO). Overall, we collected over .4 million records corresponding to the activities of 65 Kubernetes teams from March 2020 to May 2020. We use organizational routine lens to understand how routine order variation (the way in which the activities’ order varies) and bot usage can have effects on resilience in open source communities. The results highlight the importance of order variation and bot usage for OSSD teams’ resilience and provide implications for open source project management practises during crisis situations.