Exploring the Effects of Coordination and Communication Tools on the Efficiency of Open Source Projects using Data Envelopment Analysis

In this paper, we propose to explore possible benefits of communication and coordination tools in open source projects using data envelopment analysis (DEA), a general method for efficiency comparisons. DEA offers several advantages: It is a non-parametric optimization method without any need for the user to define any relations between different factors or a production function, can account for economies or diseconwhile omies of scale, and is able to deal with multi-input, multi-output systems in which the factors have different scales. Using a data set of 30 open source project retrieved from SourceForge.net, we demonstrate the application of DEA, showing that the efficiency of the projects is in general relatively high. Regarding the effects of tool employment on the efficiency of projects, the results were surprising: Most of the possible tools, and overall usage, showed a negative relationship to efficiency.