Coordinating Interdependencies in an Open Source Software Project: A Replication of Lindberg, et al.

The current study is a full replication (conceptual and empirical) of “Coordinating Interdependencies in Online Communities: A Study of an Open Source Software Project” Lindberg et al (2016), which addresses the question of how OSS communities address unresolved interdependencies. Following the original study, we analyze project development data, archived in the GitHub repository, for the OSS project Rubinius. The analysis explores relationships among development and developer interdependencies as well as activity and order variation. Further, we extend the original study by examining the core relationships in the original study and investigating the external generalizability of the results by replicating the analysis on three analogous OSS projects: JRuby, mruby, and RubyMotion. These offer an opportunity to evaluate the generalizability of the original study to projects of different sizes and amount of activity, yet similar otherwise to the project in the original study. Another extension is the use of an additional control variable, length of activity sequence, which proves to have substantial implications of the study’s focal relationships. We find that three out of the four projects we analyze support the findings of the original study as it pertains to four relationships in the original study: order variation and developer interdependencies, activity variation and developer interdependencies, order variation and development interdependencies, and development and developer interdependencies. We also discuss the implications of our findings, especially in cases where the replication results differ from those in the original study and offer suggestions for future research that can help advance this stream of research.