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).

Details

Title
What is the Truck Factor of popular GitHub applications? A first assessment
Author
Avelino, Guilherme; Valente, Marco Tulio; Hora, Andre
Publication year
2017
Publication date
Jan 2, 2017
Publisher
PeerJ, Inc.
e-ISSN
21679843
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1233v3
ProQuest document ID
1953746224
Copyright
© 2017 Avelino et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (the “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. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.