Research Questions: April 2012

In today's symposium, a comment was tossed to me concerning a question of programmer productivity. In the discussion P drew a diagram showing the economic 1% (Xaxis, income, Yaxis, number of people) and compared it to the number of contributions in a typical open source project (Xaxis, contributions, Yaxis number of people). Why, he asked, should the shape of these two curves be so similar? U suggested that it was because of the lower cost of creation that this 1% experienced; that their ability to crank out code faster gave them an advantage. V suggested that it was due to the distribution of talent in the population. I objected to the suggestion that talent was the primary factor and that led P to suggest that some basic research into the factors that influence the contributions to open source projects. Perhaps he's right.

For anyone who has worked in a software shop, we easily accept the oft made assertion that there is a factor of ten between the productivity of a good programmer and the productivity of a poor programmer. I, like I suspect most people who have written code, believe that there is clearly a talent component in one's ability to perform the kind of abstract reasoning and design needed to create computer code. However I also see people generalize far too quickly and accept these assertions uncritically. I, for one, can suggest many reasons that can explain differences in contributions in addition, possibly instead of, talent.

In my own experience, my periods of highest coding productivity happened when coding was my full time job. It seems pretty self-evident that if all you are doing is coding day-after-day you get pretty good at it. This alone can explain a lot of variation in open source software contribution.

Not everyone who contributes to an open source project may be a full-time coder. (Q: How many hours a week does a contributor spend coding? How many of those are for the open source project?)

Even when a contributor is a full-time coder, there may be differences between the coding environment of the open source project and the coding environment of their other coding work. Unlike a shop where everyone is using a small set of languages, possibly only one, with significant support for that language, an open source project will pull in a wide variety of people using a wide variety of languages at various levels. Where the contributor either works full-time on the open source project or happens to code in the same environment in their other coding work, this may contribute to high-contribution levels. (Q: When not all coding is for the open source project, what is the environment of the open source project? What is the environment for the other coding work? Language, version, IDE, )