What is the Truck Factor of popular GitHub applications? A first assessment
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Social Computing, Software Engineering
- Keywords
- Truck Factor, Code Authorship, GitHub, Open source software, Agile Programming
- Copyright
- © 2017 Avelino et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. What is the Truck Factor of popular GitHub applications? A first assessment. PeerJ Preprints 5:e1233v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1233v3
Abstract
The Truck Factor designates the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. It can be seen as a measurement of the concentration of information in individual team members. We calculate the Truck Factor for 133 popular GitHub applications, in six languages. To infer the authors of a file we use the Degree-of-Authorship (DOA) metric, which is computed using version history data, and to estimate the Truck Factor, we use a greedy heuristic. Results show that most systems have a small truck factor (46% have Truck Factor=1 and 28% have Truck Factor=2).
Author Comment
An extended and detailed version of this preprint was accepted at ICPC 2016. Please refer to: Guilherme Avelino, Leonardo Passos, Andre Hora, Marco Tulio Valente. A Novel Approach for Estimating Truck Factors. In 24th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), pages 1-10, 2016. https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.06766