Open Source Software Research - Projects

OSS Development Project Success

This work has focused broadly on understanding the antecedents to various aspects of OSS success at the project level.  These studies have explored the importance of team dynamics such as ideology, trust, and communication as well as the role that project characteristics play (e.g., license restrictiveness, target audience, project sponsorship). Some key results of this work include:

• Developing a framework of the main tenets of the OSS ideology and suggesting which tenets may be grouped to form relevant sets of values and beliefs that tend to coincide in OSS teams. 
• Providing initial empirical evidence that some shared ideological components have a positive impact on team effectiveness by enhancing trust and communication quality, while some have negative effects by either reducing input to the team or by reducing the team’s task completion.
• Demonstrating that project development stage plays an important moderating role in determining both objective and subjective performance outcomes in open source software (OSS) projects.  Subjective performance assessments are calibrated to different objective performance indicators across early and later development stages. The role of team climate variables (trust and shared ideology) in determining both objective and subjective performance also varies across stages.
• Developing and testing a model showing that (1) license restrictiveness and organizational sponsorship interact to influence user perceptions of the likely utility of OSS in such a way that users are most attracted to projects that are sponsored by non-market organizations and employ non-restrictive licenses and (2) licensing and sponsorship address complementary developer motivations such that the influence of licensing on developer activity depends on what kind of organizational sponsor a project has.

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Complexity in OSS

To extend the general work on success described above, this project focuses on understanding patterns of evolution within OSS projects by studying changes in software complexity over time.  Work completed to-date has:

• Developed a statistical technique for analyzing code evolution.
• Uncovered patterns of evolution among OSS projects, including identifying a particularly interesting pattern in which structural complexity of the software code is decreased as size is increased.
• Created a categorization schema identifying 6 distinct types of OSS projects based on their evolutionary patterns and other project factors (this is work in progress).

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Women's Involvement in OSS Development

Consistent with the general findings that women’s rates of participation in IT related fields remains relatively low across both the United States and Europe, survey and anecdotal evidence has indicated that attracting and retaining women participants in OSS projects has been particularly challenging.  In recognition of this fact, several “grass roots” groups have formed focusing on facilitating the involvement of women in OSS.  These are volunteer-led online groups that provide a forum and resources for women participants in OSS projects, with the explicit aim of increasing the numbers of women who contribute to OSS.

This research focuses on how one such group, KDE Women, influences the participation of individual women in the work of the KDE OSS project.  Specifically, this study addresses the question, how do women use the KDE Women’s group to help them define or change their role in KDE?  This research will help address the larger question of how OSS projects attract and retain workers, which is a key to their success that has been identified by prior studies.

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