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).

Comments

Could be worse

[thaneross]

You know what's significantly worse than an Open Source project with TF1? A closed source project with a TF1.

Tragic, but not catastrophic

[Sarten-X]

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.

Re:Tragic, but not catastrophic

[davester666]

Maybe next time, just ask him to explain his code instead of killing him and throwing him in the river.

Re:morbid story is morbid

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

I think there are bigger issues going on than if an open source project dies if someone gets hit by a truck.
Seriously, you guys think that some stupid piece of software is more important than human life...

OK, if it makes you feel better, we'll call it the "Girl Factor". That's the number of developers who have to discover girls before the project is incapacatated.

Re:morbid story is morbid

[Bert64]

It's actually less of a concern than it is with small vendor closed source...
There have been a few small software vendors where the company owner or core developer was killed, which then resulted not only in the ceasing of development, but also in the source code either being lost or tied up in legal disputes for years.

For something that's open and has user interest, it can be forked and development can be continued by someone else...