Towards a Portfolio of FLOSS Project Success Measures

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Kevin Crowston, Syracuse UniversityFollow
Hala Annabi, Syracuse UniversityFollow
James Howison, Syracuse University
Chengetai Masango, Syracuse University

Document Type

Article

Date

2004

Keywords

Free/Libre Open Source Software projects, FLOSS, SourceForge, software development

Language

English

Disciplines

Library and Information Science

Description/Abstract

Project success is one of the most widely used dependent variables in information systems research. However, conventional measures of project success are difficult to apply to Free/Libre Open Source Software projects. In this paper, we present an analysis of four measures of success applied to SourceForge projects: number of members of the extended development community, project activity, bug fixing time and number of downloads. We argue that these four measures provide different insights into the collaboration and control mechanisms of the projects.

Recommended Citation

Towards a portfolio of FLOSS project success measures (with H. Annabi, J. Howison and C. Masango) (Presentation at the Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering, 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, 25 May).

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.