Title: Socio-Technical Congruence in the Ruby Ecosystem

Authors: Mahbubul Syeed (Tampere University of Technology), Klaus Marius Hansen (University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark), Imed Hammouda (Chalmers and University of Gothenburg, Sweden), Konstantinos Manikas (University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark)

Abstract: Existing studies show that open source projects may enjoy high levels of socio-technical congruence despite their open and distributed character. Such observations are yet to be confirmed in the case of larger open source ecosystems in which developers contribute to different projects within the ecosystem. In this paper, we empirically study the relationships between the developer coordination activities and the project dependency structure in the Ruby ecosystem. Our motivation is to verify whether the ecosystem context maintains the high socio-technical congruence levels observed in many smaller scale FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) projects. Our study results show that the collaboration pattern among the developers in Ruby ecosystem is not necessarily shaped by the communication needs indicated by the dependencies among the ecosystem projects.

This contribution to OpenSym 2014 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2014 proceedings on or after August 27, 2014.