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. 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. Using Gnome as a case study, and following a Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach, we statistically explore how these software and community aspects relate to each other. We classify the workload of project contributors into distinct activity types (such as coding, localisation and developer documentation), and explore to which extent projects and contributors specialise in particular activity types and how this varies across the different projects of the ecosystem.