A Longitudinal, Multi-Project Study of Bug Tracking Productivity and Learning in Open Source Software Development

The dynamics of Open Source Software development haverecently received a lot of attention from an organizationallearning perspective. Following a network theoretic approach,we study the temporal development of communication networkstructure and productivity in order to detect associationsamong these constructs. Thereby, we identify a researchgap in that related work either focuses on too fewprojects or utilizes insucient numbers of analyzed timeframes.Our study is both multi-project and longitudinal inorder to detect holistic inuencing factors of successful OpenSource Software development. First, we nd that learningeects are present since productivity increases over time.Next, we observe that growth in team size impedes productivitywhereas the continuous concentration on centralnodes coincides with increasing productivity. Against ourexpectation, we also nd that increasing centralization doesnot yield decreasing network density, possibly due to OpenSource Software developers deliberately avoiding the dependenceon bottleneck nodes