The anatomy of collaborative open-source software development

A practice-based view on how open-source communities work

Abstract

Knowledge work is comprised of specialists who collaborate by exchanging expertise and skills to produce products and services; this is exactly what happens in open-source software development communities, albeit in a virtual and globally distributed manner. In this study, we examine two large and well-known open-source communities, specifically OpenStack and Automotive Grade Linux. More specifically, we take the theoretical notion of information literacy (IL) practice to analyse the day-to-day information-intensive activities of those communities. We collect and analyse naturally occurring publicly available digital trace data derived from the projects from an IL perspective. We report a set of ten information-intensive activities that are presented to an audience interested in IL and digital work, but not necessarily in software development. These ten activities are branching, committing, fetching, pushing, merging, reviewing, continuously integrating, gating, release management, and announcing — that collectively constitute the developers' information practice. While most of the reported information activities cannot be carried out in non-digital environments, the increasing trend towards the digitalisation of work reiterates the importance of studying the production and knowledge management practices in digital work.