Effort Modeling and Programmer Participation in Open Source Software Projects

This paper analyses and develops models for programmer participation and effort estimation in open source software projects. This has not yet been a centre of research, although any results would be of high importance for assessing the efficiency of this model and for various decision-makers. In this paper, a case study is used for hypotheses generation regarding manpower function and effort modeling, then a large data set retrieved from a project repository is used to test these hypotheses. The main results are that Norden-Rayleigh-based approaches need to be complemented to account for the addition of new features during the lifecycle to be usable in this context, and that programmer-participation based effort models show significantly less effort than those based on output metrics like lines-of-code. (author's abstract)