This paper discusses the collection and analysis of software development and sociological metrics related to open-source development. Open-source development often involves hundreds of participants who do not share a working environment or management chain. Participants work for free, contributing their own time and effort toward the project’s goals.

This paper suggests an architecture that combines data collection and analysis to enable analysis of the ways the projects and participants interact and develop a software base. The authors describe specific tools that they have built and relate research results based on those tools. The sample data presented relates to the number of lines of code contributed and present in the project and the number of contributors to those projects. The tool integrates this data with a visualization environment to compare code size and contributor size over time. The particular case studies serve as references to the value of the tools.

Overall, this paper is of interest to those studying the sociological aspects of open-source development where communities of contributors change over time based on individual contributor preferences.