Emergence of New Project Teams from Open Source Software Developer Networks: Impact of Prior Collaboration Ties

Abstract

Software development has traditionally been regarded as an activity that can only be effectively conducted and managed within a firm setting. However, contrary to such assertions, the open source software development (OSSD) approach, in which software developers in Internet-based communities coordinate to voluntarily contribute programming code, has recently emerged as a promising alternative to developing high quality software. Although many high profile cases of successful OSSD projects exist (e.g., Apache, OpenOffice, Emacs, PHP), the harsh reality is that the vast majority of OSS projects fail to take off and become abandoned. A commonly cited reason for the failure of OSS projects is the lack of developers in the project teams, or put differently, the inability of the software project to bring together a critical mass of developers. In this paper, we examine how OSSD project teams are formed. More specifically, we investigate whether prior collaborative ties impact OSSD team formation and developers' joining behaviors. Using software project data from real world OSSD projects, we empirically test the impact of previous collaborative ties on software team formation. Overall, we find that the existence and the amount of prior collaborative relations in the developer network do increase the probability that an OSS project will attract more developers and that a developer's prior relationships with a project initiator do increase the likelihood that a developer will join a project initiated by a past collaborator. We also explore the performance implications of early team formation behaviors. We discuss the implications of our results with respect to open source software development and software project management.

User-Generated Open Source Products: Founder's Social Capital and Time to Product Release

“…Emerging literature in OSS also recognizes the importance of social networks (Hahn et al 2008); we extend this research in two ways. First, rather than studying product outcomes such as commercial success (Grewal et al 2006), we consider the NPD process with time to first product release as an NPD process metric.…”

“…Overall, the degree of user engagement should reduce time to product release. However, when the project founder's social capital is greater, the beneficial effects of degree of user engagement should be stronger: More social capital enables founders to understand and take advantage of user engagement and feedback to speed up the NPD process (Grewal et al 2006, Hahn et al 2008. Therefore, Hypothesis 4 (H 4 ).…”

“…We have no a priori theoretical reason to support one of these distributions over others and use model fit to select among them. Prior studies also employ data from SourceForge (e.g., Grewal et al 2006, Hahn et al 2008, and von Krogh and von Hippel (2006) cite it as an attractive venue for research into user communities and hybrid innovation models. We gathered data on the network structure of OSS projects at their founding and the projects' characteristics from a sample of open source projects registered on SourceForge.…”

“…Several of our hypotheses are new, and our findings add to sparse research on specific factors that influence NPD success in an OSS context. Grewal et al (2006) consider the role of networks in the technical and commercial success of OSS products, and Hahn et al (2008) examine how prior ties affect the formation of new OSS project teams. Other studies investigate the role of OSS project features on success (Stewart et al 2006, Subramaniam et al 2009).…”

Towards Understanding Developers’ Collaborative Behavior in Open Source Software Ecosystems

“…Ducheneaut [16] pointed out that prior technical activity and social standing in the community are strong factors in achieving developer's status. Hahn et al [17] examined how OSS project developer teams form and developers' joining behavior, and they tested the impact of previous collaborative ties on software team formation.…”