Learning and Activity Patterns in OSS Communities and their Impact on Software Quality

Abstract: This paper presents a framework to identify and analyse learning and activity patterns that characterise participation and collaboration of individuals in Open Source Software (OSS) communities. It first describes how participants ’ ac-tivities enable and drive a learning process that occurs in individual participants as well as in the OSS project community as a whole. It then explores how to identify and analyse learning patterns at both individual level and community level. The ob-jective of such analysis is to determine the impact of these patterns on the quality of the OSS product and define a descriptive approach to quality that is concerned less with standards than with the facts of OSS peer-review and peer-production