TY - JOUR
T1 - Revisiting Linus's law
T2 - Benefits and challenges of open source software peer review
AU - Wang, Jing
AU - Shih, Patrick C.
AU - Carroll, John M.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is supported by the US NSF ( 0943023 ). We thank our partner, the Mozilla organization for sharing their practices.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
PY - 2015/5
Y1 - 2015/5
N2 - Open source projects leverage a large number of people to review products and improve code quality. Differences among participants are inevitable and important to this collaborative review process - participants with different expertise, experience, resources, and values approach the problems differently, increasing the likelihood of finding more bugs and fixing the particularly difficult ones. To understand the impacts of member differences on the open source software peer review process, we examined bug reports of Mozilla Firefox. These analyses show that the various types of member differences increase workload as well as frustration and conflicts. However, they facilitate situated learning, problem characterization, design review, and boundary spanning. We discuss implications for work performance and community engagement, and suggest several ways to leverage member differences in the open source software peer review process.
AB - Open source projects leverage a large number of people to review products and improve code quality. Differences among participants are inevitable and important to this collaborative review process - participants with different expertise, experience, resources, and values approach the problems differently, increasing the likelihood of finding more bugs and fixing the particularly difficult ones. To understand the impacts of member differences on the open source software peer review process, we examined bug reports of Mozilla Firefox. These analyses show that the various types of member differences increase workload as well as frustration and conflicts. However, they facilitate situated learning, problem characterization, design review, and boundary spanning. We discuss implications for work performance and community engagement, and suggest several ways to leverage member differences in the open source software peer review process.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84923257707&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2015.01.005
DO - 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2015.01.005
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84923257707
SN - 1071-5819
VL - 77
SP - 52
EP - 65
JO - International Journal of Human Computer Studies
JF - International Journal of Human Computer Studies
ER -