Coordination and productivity issues in free software: The role of brooks' law

2009 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance Pub Date : 2009-10-30 DOI:10.1109/ICSM.2009.5306308

Paul J. Adams, A. Capiluppi, C. Boldyreff

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引用次数: 30

Abstract

Proponents of the Free Software paradigm have argued that some of the most established software engineering principles do not fully apply when considered in an open, distributed approach found in Free Software development. The objective of this research is to empirically examine the Brooks' Law in a Free Software context. The principle is separated out into its two primary premises: the first is based on a developer's ability to become productive when joining a new team; the second premise relates to the quality of coordination as the team grows. Three large projects are studied for this purpose: KDE, Plone and Evince. Based on empirical evidence, the paper provides two main contributions: based on the first premise of Brooks' Law, it claims that coordination costs increase only in a very specific phase for Free Software projects. After that, these costs become quasi-constant. Secondly, it shows that a ramp up period exists in Free Software projects, and this period marks the divide between projects that are successful at engaging new contributors from others that only benefit from occasional new contributors.

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自由软件中的协调和生产力问题:布鲁克斯定律的作用

自由软件范式的支持者认为，当考虑到自由软件开发中的开放、分布式方法时，一些最成熟的软件工程原则并不完全适用。本研究的目的是在自由软件环境下对布鲁克斯定律进行实证检验。该原则分为两个主要前提:第一个是基于开发者加入新团队时的生产能力;第二个前提与团队成长过程中的协调质量有关。为此研究了三个大型项目:KDE、Plone和Evince。基于经验证据，本文提供了两个主要贡献:基于布鲁克斯定律的第一个前提，它声称协调成本只在自由软件项目的一个非常特定的阶段增加。在那之后，这些成本就变成了准常数。其次，它显示了自由软件项目中存在一个上升阶段，这一阶段标志着项目之间的区别，哪些项目成功地吸引了来自他人的新贡献者，哪些项目只从偶尔的新贡献者中受益。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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2009 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance

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