As part of my PhD research on code authorship, we calculated the Truck Factor (TF) of some popular GitHub repositories.
As you probably know, the Truck (or Bus) Factor designates the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. In our work, we consider that a system is in trouble if more than 50% of its files become orphan (i.e., without a main author).
More details on our work in this preprint: https://peerj.com/preprints/1233
We calculated the TF for IPython and obtained a value of 4.
The developers responsible for this TF are:
MinRK - author of 41% of the files
Thomas Kluyver - author of 23% of the files
Brian Granger - author of 19% of the files
Jonathan Frederic - author of 16% of the files
To validate our results, we would like to ask IPython developers the following three brief questions:
(a) Do you agree that the listed developers are the main developers of IPython?
(b) Do you agree that IPython will be in trouble if the listed developers leave the project (e.g., if they win in the lottery, to be less morbid)?
(c) Does IPython have some characteristics that would attenuate the loss of the listed developers (e.g., detailed documentation)?
Thanks in advance for your collaboration,
Guilherme Avelino
PhD Student
Applied Software Engineering Group (ASERG)
UFMG, Brazil
http://aserg.labsoft.dcc.ufmg.br/
As part of my PhD research on code authorship, we calculated the Truck Factor (TF) of some popular GitHub repositories.
As you probably know, the Truck (or Bus) Factor designates the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. In our work, we consider that a system is in trouble if more than 50% of its files become orphan (i.e., without a main author).
More details on our work in this preprint: https://peerj.com/preprints/1233
We calculated the TF for IPython and obtained a value of 4.
The developers responsible for this TF are:
MinRK - author of 41% of the files
Thomas Kluyver - author of 23% of the files
Brian Granger - author of 19% of the files
Jonathan Frederic - author of 16% of the files
To validate our results, we would like to ask IPython developers the following three brief questions:
(a) Do you agree that the listed developers are the main developers of IPython?
(b) Do you agree that IPython will be in trouble if the listed developers leave the project (e.g., if they win in the lottery, to be less morbid)?
(c) Does IPython have some characteristics that would attenuate the loss of the listed developers (e.g., detailed documentation)?
Thanks in advance for your collaboration,
Guilherme Avelino
PhD Student
Applied Software Engineering Group (ASERG)
UFMG, Brazil
http://aserg.labsoft.dcc.ufmg.br/