Communication Overhead In Open Source Software Projects

Abstract

Open source software development is gaining more popularity in recent times. It is predominantly because of the flexible nature of open source software projects. Countless famous organizations also have started investing their resources in open source software development teams. In addition to this, agile software development has been dominating the software development domain for several years. Agile software development focuses on inter-actions, collaboration, and requirement changes therefore communication between contributors in open source software projects following agile development has notable importance. In open-source software projects participation of contributors solely depends on their motivation, due to this contributor’s longevity in the project is also significant. Since productivity is of interest in many research fields, therefore, this study focuses on analyzing the effect of communication overhead and team member longevity on productivity for open source software projects that are following agile software development. Two projects, MESOS and FABRIC have been analyzed in this thesis. The paper starts with defining hypotheses and afterward analyzing them using statistical tests. The result of the analysis shows that there is no correlation between communication overhead, team member longevity, and productivity which was studied based on velocity for the considered open-source software projects. This paper also presents limitations of the thesis and work that can be considered as further research on the topic.