Developer experience · Peer-reviewed empirical study or research synthesis
How Peripheral Developers Contribute to Open-Source Software Development
Information Systems Research · 2012
Summary
Peripheral developers made significant contributions to product quality and diffusion, especially when projects were in more mature product-development stages. Founder-use interpretation: Use this as a question to test in your own product context, not as a universal benchmark. The publisher abstract does not report a dedicated limitations section. The study is observational and its sample consists of 147 open-source products, so representativeness, measurement validity, and causal interpretation beyond the sampled projects cannot be established from the publisher record alone.
For your marketing
Possible founder application
Use this as a question to test in your own product context, not as a universal benchmark. The publisher abstract does not report a dedicated limitations section. The study is observational and its sample consists of 147 open-source products, so representativeness, measurement validity, and causal interpretation beyond the sampled projects cannot be established from the publisher record alone.
Reported result
What the study found
Peripheral developers made significant contributions to product quality and diffusion, especially when projects were in more mature product-development stages.
Research question
What the authors investigated
How Peripheral Developers Contribute to Open-Source Software Development?
Design
Longitudinal observational study of open-source products using hierarchical linear modeling to estimate how peripheral-developer involvement relates to product quality and diffusion over product-development stages.
Sample and setting
147 open-source software products; peripheral developers are external volunteers whose contributions include product-quality work and word-of-mouth advocacy/diffusion.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
The publisher abstract does not report a dedicated limitations section. The study is observational and its sample consists of 147 open-source products, so representativeness, measurement validity, and causal interpretation beyond the sampled projects cannot be established from the publisher record alone.
Research sources
Publisher record directly retrieved with Firecrawl (reference 01a122cb-0315-7609-866e-c5ea0a7a6079); summary is a careful paraphrase of the accessible record.