Flashlight Truck Factor

[gavelino]

As part of my PhD research on code authorship, we calculated the Truck Factor (TF) of some popular GitHub repositories.

As you probably know, the Truck (or Bus) Factor designates the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. In our work, we consider that a system is in trouble if more than 50% of its files become orphan (i.e., without a main author).

More details on our work in this preprint: https://peerj.com/preprints/1233

We calculated the TF for Flashlight and obtained a value of 1.

The developer responsible for this TF is:

Nate Parrott - author of 75% of the files

To validate our results, we would like to ask Flashlight developers the following three brief questions:

(a) Do you agree that the listed developer is the main developer of Flashlight?

(b) Do you agree that Flashlight will be in trouble if the listed developer leave the project (e.g., if he wins in the lottery, to be less morbid)?

(c) Does Flashlight have some characteristics that would attenuate the loss of the listed developer (e.g., detailed documentation)?

Thanks in advance for your collaboration,

Guilherme Avelino
PhD Student
Applied Software Engineering Group (ASERG)
UFMG, Brazil
http://aserg.labsoft.dcc.ufmg.br/