An empirical study on the specialisation effect in Open Source communities

Since a couple of decades, open source software has gained popularity due to the savings they represent and the ability for the users to modify and improve the software themeselves. As the number of projects which the entire history is available grows over time, the number of empirical studies on them grows as well. Most of these empirical studies are carried out with no consideration for other artefacts but source code. Unfortunately, a restriction to the study of source code evolution only is not sufficient to understand and explain some evolutionary behaviour. In order to gain a better insight into how a software project evolves, information about persons involved in the software development, and in particular developers, must be taken into account.
We are carrying out an empirical study on the evolution of the GNOME1 ecosystem, a collection of 1325 open source projects. Our aim is to study how the developers involved in an open source software community organize themselves to share development tasks.