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Free, libre, open-source software projects (FLOSS) are known for their chaotic development style and unique collaboration model. How does such chaotic development produce high quality software and attract users and developers? To provide insight into this conundrum, this study explores the roles of diversity and change in design routines. It investigates the relationship between routine diversity and change on project attraction to users and developers. Various sequence-mining techniques such as motif analysis and hidden Markov models (HMM) are applied to examine design routines of 88 FLOSS projects on GitHub.com. Regression analysis reveals that development processes with high routine-diversity and relatively low change-magnitude attract more users and developers.

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Diversity in Software Development Routines are Attractive: A Preliminary Analysis of GitHub Repositories

Free, libre, open-source software projects (FLOSS) are known for their chaotic development style and unique collaboration model. How does such chaotic development produce high quality software and attract users and developers? To provide insight into this conundrum, this study explores the roles of diversity and change in design routines. It investigates the relationship between routine diversity and change on project attraction to users and developers. Various sequence-mining techniques such as motif analysis and hidden Markov models (HMM) are applied to examine design routines of 88 FLOSS projects on GitHub.com. Regression analysis reveals that development processes with high routine-diversity and relatively low change-magnitude attract more users and developers.