Title
Followership in an Open-Source Software Project and its Significance in Code Reuse.
Abstract
Code reuse is fundamental to the development of open-source software (OSS). Therefore, understanding how and why it occurs is important. To date, researchers have examined code reuse in OSS largely from the perspective of leaders. We show why followers must be considered as well. "Followers" are people who have had previous contacts with an individual from another project and who continue to associate with him or her. We consider two types of followers: developers (those directly involved in software development) and observers (those indirectly involved in it). We conduct a series of empirical investigations by using a longitudinal dataset of OSS projects hosted in GitHub, along with a survey and qualitative data. We find that followership can affect code reuse, but the effect depends on the nature of the follower (developer or observer). Overall, our study suggests that followership is important for code reuse in OSS because it enables participants to learn, and learning promotes code reuse.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.25300/MISQ/2019/14043
MIS QUARTERLY
Keywords
Field
DocType
Open-source software,code reuse,developer,observer,followership theory
Qualitative property,Computer science,Knowledge management,Software,Followership,Code reuse,Open source software,Software development
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
43
4.0
0276-7783
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qiqi Jiang100.34
Chuan-Hoo Tan245142.18
Choon-ling Sia380042.96
Kwok Kee Wei44103195.60