Trust in Open Source Software Development Communities: A Comprehensive Analysis

1. Introduction

Open source software development (OSSD) is an ideology, which has paved the way for which dedicated teams of volunteer software developers participate and contribute in various areas of software engineering. The aim of OSSD communities is to make a high quality and reliable software, no matter how complex an application may be (Asundi, 2001). The project is initiated by the core team and is made open for developers across the globe to contributing code and feature enhancements. The core team of the project analyzes the contributions from various contributors. The core team may have single or number of coordinators. Coordinators are project creators and are responsible for the evolution and growth of the community. They would take the final decision to incorporate the received code into the final build and release the next test version of the software. After rigorous testing and debugging when the required quality of software is achieved, test versions of software are promoted to be the next stable release. Further, with the passage of time new contributions in form of bug fixes and feature enhancements for the software are received. The same cycle of thorough testing and integration of code into existing software is followed. Every effort is done to attract more and more people towards the project and with the passage of time the community grows. The team members of the OSSD community provide feedback, which acts as a base for the planning of future project managing strategies. With constant efforts, gradually, the project attains high quality and upcoming issues are dealt with even better ways. The ways in which development work is coordinated and communicated amongst the developers makes it different from existing software development strategies and this is what is unique. It is intended to perform a study for improvement of the relationship among the virtual team members of an OSSD community, which in turn enhances the quality of the developed open source software. We move ahead with this work, keeping in mind the following research objectives.