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Calculating the Truck-Factor of Popular Open Source Projects
An anonymous reader writes: The Truck Factor describes the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. Wikipedia defines it as a "measurement of the concentration of information in individual team members. A high truck factor means that many individuals know enough to carry on and the project could still succeed even in very adverse events." The term is also known by bus factor/number. In this article, the authors calculate the truck factor for 133 popular GitHub applications. Spoiler, but unsurprising: Linux ranks near the top (meaning that it's highly resilient).
I once joined a project where one of the core developers had mysteriously disappeared. He had been one of the early designers, and was the only person who actually knew how his areas worked.
It took a small team about a year to fully understand all of his work, but the project survived. To this day, four years after his disappearance (three after his body was pulled from a river), we still find some code with his name on it, and it's a tradition to assign it to the newest team member to read, understand and deliver a report on how it works. It's a rough process, but we got through it eventually.
His legacy on the project is as an object lesson in the necessity of good commenting, and a reminder to management that they must be wary of one-man teams.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It's morbid as hell, [...]
To avoid the morbid feeling, I prefer a different wording: "Lottery factor", meaning when someone wins the lottery, cashes the money and never comes back. I imagine the person living on a personal tropical paradise without any access to the internet. So this person won't be reachable, won't contribute but is not dead but enjoys life. Same effect, less morbid.