Abstract
The development Open Source Software fundamentally depends on the participation and commitment of volunteer developers to progress on a particular task. Several works have presented strategies to increase the on-boarding and engagement of new contributors, but little is known on how these diverse groups of developers self-organise to work together. To understand this, one must consider that, on one hand, platforms like GitHub provide a virtually unlimited development framework: any number of actors can potentially join to contribute in a decentralised, distributed, remote, and asynchronous manner. On the other, however, it seems reasonable that some sort of hierarchy and division of labour must be in place to meet human biological and cognitive limits, and also to achieve some level of efficiency. These latter features (hierarchy and division of labour) should translate into detectable structural arrangements when projects are represented as developer-file bipartite networks. Thus, in this paper we analyse a set of popular open source projects from GitHub, placing the accent on three key properties: nestedness, modularity and in-block nestedness –which typify the emergence of heterogeneities among contributors, the emergence of subgroups of developers working on specific subgroups of files, and a mixture of the two previous, respectively. These analyses show that indeed projects evolve into internally organised blocks. Furthermore, the distribution of sizes of such blocks is bounded, connecting our results to the celebrated Dunbar number both in off- and on-line environments. Our conclusions create a link between bio-cognitive constraints, group formation and online working environments, opening up a rich scenario for future research on (online) work team assembly (e.g. size, composition, and formation). From a complex network perspective, our results pave the way for the study of time-resolved datasets, and the design of suitable models that can mimic the growth and evolution of OSS projects.
Highlights
Open Source Software (OSS) is a key actor in the current software market, and a major factor in the consistent growth of the software economy
Before we focus on the structural arrangements of interest, we explore whether a potentially unbounded interaction capability is mirrored in actual OSS projects across 4 orders of magnitude in size
We observe that projects tend to form blocks, a fact that can be related to the need of contributors to distribute coding efforts, allowing a project to develop steadily and in a balanced way
Summary
Open Source Software (OSS) is a key actor in the current software market, and a major factor in the consistent growth of the software economy. Most projects have a low truck factor, meaning that a small group of developers is responsible for a large set of code contributions[8,9,10] This pushes projects to depend more and more on their ability to attract and retain occasional contributors ( known as “drive-by” commits11) that can complement the few core developers and help them to move the project forward. Public collaborative repositories place no limits, in principle, to the number of developers (and files) that a project should host In this sense, platforms like GitHub resemble online social networks (e.g. Twitter or Facebook), in which the number of allowed connections is virtually unbounded. Do these limits apply in collaborative networks, where contributors work remotely and asynchronously? Does a division of labour arise, even when interaction among developers is mostly indirect (that is, via the files that they edit in common)? And, even if specialised subgroups emerge (as some evidence already suggests, at least in developer social networks20), do these exhibit some sort of internal organisation?
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