A Novel Approach for Estimating Truck Factors

Truck Factor (TF) is a metric proposed by the agile community as a tool to identify concentration of knowledge in software development environments. It states the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. In other words, TF helps to meas...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2016-04
Main Authors: Avelino, Guilherme, Passos, Leonardo, Hora, Andre, Valente, Marco Tulio
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Backing
Estimation
Reliability analysis
Software development
Software development tools
Surveying
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Truck Factor (TF) is a metric proposed by the agile community as a tool to identify concentration of knowledge in software development environments. It states the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. In other words, TF helps to measure how prepared is a project to deal with developer turnover. Despite its clear relevance, few studies explore this metric. Altogether there is no consensus about how to calculate it, and no supporting evidence backing estimates for systems in the wild. To mitigate both issues, we propose a novel (and automated) approach for estimating TF-values, which we execute against a corpus of 133 popular project in GitHub. We later survey developers as a means to assess the reliability of our results. Among others, we find that the majority of our target systems (65%) have TF
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1604.06766