Design Routines and
Open Source Software
Success
Xinyu Li
3/23/2016
Outcome of Open Source Software (OSS)
 Software quality and usefulness (Lee et al. 2009)
 community service quality (Subramaniam et al. 2009)
 OSS success (Bonaccorsi and Rossi 2003, Crowston et al. 2006a)
Motivation
Process of Open Source Software
 Team communication and collaboration (Crowston et al. 2006b,
Yamauchi et al. 2000)
 Structure and Hierarchy (Crowston and Howison 2006)
 Motivation and Contribution (Setia et al. 2012, Von Krogh et al. 2003)
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Proposal
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Research
Question
3/23/2016
 Can we observe design paradigms in the
development phase of OSS projects?
 Do design paradigms in OSS development
make those projects more likely to succeed?
Proposal
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An organizational routine view (Feldman and
Pentland 2003, Pentland and Feldman 2005, Pentland and Reuter 1994)
 Design routine as a subset of organizational routine (Gaskin et
al. forthcoming)
Theoretical
Foundation
 Routines improve efficiency and performance (Pentland et al.
2011)
Measurement of OSS success
 The number of users (downloads)
 Survival (lifetime)
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Proposal
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 H1: The frequency of design routines of an OSS
project is positively associated with the number
of download of the software.
Hypotheses
 H2: The frequency of design routines of an OSS
project is positively associated with the lifetime
of the software.
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Proposal
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 Github (main data source)
 OSS platform
 Time-stamped digital trace data
 Project, actor, time and action, etc.
 Currently 200 projects, may be expanded
Data and
Methods
 Sequence analysis
 Convert digital trace into event sequence data
 Detect repeated subsequences
 Clustering analysis
 Subsequence clusters as design routines
 Regression
 DV, IV and control variables
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Potential
Contributions
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 Bridge the theoretical gap between the process
of OSS development and the success of OSS
 Offer a new perspective to understand the
process of OSS development
Proposal
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 Questions
Thank You
 Comments
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Proposal
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