The Allocation of Collaborative Efforts in Open-Source Software

The article investigates the allocation of collaborative efforts among core developers (maintainers) of open source software by analyzing on-line development traces (logs) for a set of 10 large projects. We specifically investigate whether the division of labor within open-source projects is influenced by characteristics of software code. We suggest that the collaboration between maintainers tends to be influenced by file vintage, by modularity, and by different measures of the complexity of the code. We interpret these findings as providing preliminary evidence that the organization of open-source software development would self-adapt to characteristics of the code base, in a stigmergic manner