Ghapanchi, Aurum and Low
(2011) collect open source software (OSS) literature and try to discover a
commonality of the definition for success in OSS projects. The authors
concentrated on OSS because it is unlike proprietary software due to its
reliance on volunteer community members as developers, bug reporters, document
writers, and troubleshooters. OSS projects have proven to be very beneficial
and profitable; however, the majority of the OSS projects fail. The authors
search through literature to find what makes certain OSS projects successful or
at least a guage to measure the project's success.
The authors identified
six broad measures for success in an OSS project. The measures included project
activity, project efficiency, project effectiveness, project performance, user
interest, and product quality. Ghapanchi, Aurum, and Low (2011) developed a
chart that classified existing OSS literature into one of these six measures.
Additionally, they
continued to define and explain the six measures. They describe project
activity as one of the pillars of OSS project success. Activity stems
production and growth along with product interests. Project efficiency involves
maximum outputs from the projects available resources. Project effectiveness
entails producing an effect or outcome. Project performance focuses on
different measures to evaluate project outcomes during development. User
interests are defined as the ability of an OSS project to attract community
members to adopt the software. Finally, product quality deals with the software
quality as an output from the development process.
Through these defined
measures of success, the authors offer insight for both practitioners and
researchers. The article offers an excellent resource for defining success and
points to other excellent articles that I will read in the near future to grow
my literature review.
Ghapanchi, A., Aurum,
A., & Low, G. (2011). A taxonomy for measuring the success of open source
software projects. First Monday, 16(8).
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