An Exploratory Study of Open Source Projects from a Project Management Perspective

As open source software (OSS) development is gaining tremendous popularity, effective OSS project management is becoming increasingly crucial to the success of OSS projects. However, few studies have examined open source from project management perspective. Furthermore, the congruence between project characteristics and project management has not been recognized in the existing OSS literature despite the vast variety of open source projects in existence. In this paper we identify two fundamental types of OSS projects based on the intended audience of projects, namely user-targeted projects and developer-targeted projects. Then we try to identify the aspects of project management that have an impact on OSS project performance for different types of projects. Our empirical analysis of a large sample of open source projects indicates that human resource staffing and release management are crucial to both types of projects. In addition, compensation management is particularly important to usertargeted projects whereas communication and coordination is particularly essential to developertargeted projects.