Open Source Software Development Projects: Review on Effort and Efficiency

In this section we will review literature on open source software development projects, focusing on their expended effort as well as achieved efficiency. The paper is based mostly on empirical analyses of open source communities. The main method employed is mining the associated software repositories which are publicly available and contain records of past interactions between participants, or between participants and the repository itself. We will present a short overview concerning this methodology, and reference some papers which deal with the technicalities in more detail. From that we will distill some characteristics found in open source software development projects, which includes foremost the high concentration on a few heads. We will then focus on the estimated effort expended for open source development projects, which in comparison to commercial organizational settings seems to be quite small, and relate these points to the efficiency that this form of software development achieves.