Kalle Lyytinen, professor of design and innovation; Aron Lindberg, PhD candidate at the Weatherhead School of Management; and Nicholas Berente (MGT ’04, ’09), assistant professor of management information systems at the University of Georgia, recently received the Academy of Management Organizational Communication and Information Systems (OCIS) best paper award. Their paper, “Towards Open Source Software Development Life-Cycle,” was selected from among 183 submitted manuscripts.
This is the second time in three years that Lyytinen has received this recognition.
The paper presents the case for thinking of Open Source Software (OSS) development processes in terms of lifecycles, the same way software development has been known from its earliest days to follow a cyclical development pattern of inception, development and decay.
“Although existing research provides insight into various processes which OSS communities follow,” Lyytinen, Lindberg and Berente write, “we have little understanding of how these processes vary across the release cycle and whether they exhibit any stages.”
To investigate, the authors conducted an extensive analysis of a major OSS project, Ruby on Rails. Based off of their research, the paper identifies three distinct stages between each release:
- Cleanup: exhibiting a balance between discourse-driven and direct problem solving routines
- Sedimentation: dominated by direct problem solving routines
- Negotiation: dominated by discourse-driven problem solving routines
These distinct stages suggest the presence of a lifecycle within OSS release processes.