ThinkUp Truck Factor

[gavelino]

As part of my PhD research on code authorship, we calculated the Truck Factor (TF) of some popular GitHub repositories.

As you probably know, the Truck (or Bus) Factor designates the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. In our work, we consider that a system is in trouble if more than 50% of its files become orphan (i.e., without a main author).

More details on our work in this preprint: https://peerj.com/preprints/1233

We calculated the TF for ThinkUp and obtained a value of 2.

The developers responsible for this TF are:

Gina Trapani - author of 85% of the files Chris Moyer - author of 12% of the files

To validate our results, we would like to ask ThinkUp developers the following three brief questions:

(a) Do you agree that the listed developers are the main developers of ThinkUp?

(b) Do you agree that ThinkUp will be in trouble if the listed developers leave the project (e.g., if they win in the lottery, to be less morbid)?

(c) Does ThinkUp have some characteristics that would attenuate the loss of the listed developers (e.g., detailed documentation)?

Thanks in advance for your collaboration,

Guilherme Avelino PhD Student Applied Software Engineering Group (ASERG) UFMG, Brazil http://aserg.labsoft.dcc.ufmg.br/

[oparoz]

Interesting research. Do you have a script? I'd be interested in finding out the truck factor of various ownCloud projects.

[gavelino]

Hi @oparoz,

The tool used is available on https://github.com/mtov/Truck-Factor