Thierry Burger-Helmchen

Open source software (OSS) development as an inexpensive process to develop software threatens proprietary software business strategies. Providing business strategy to benefit from volunteer developers for the purpose of contributing to existing projects, as well as initiating new OSS projects is of utmost significance for companies in that industry. Therefore, it is important to figure out how groups of volunteer developers are formed as new developers join existing projects, and it is even more important to investigate what causes these developers to initiate new projects. The authors investigate network structure as a causal factor for both new project initiation within a group (representing group innovation) as well as new developers joining existing projects within a group (representing group growth). The authors develop four hypotheses:
1. Intra-group coupling has a positive impact on group growth,
2. Inter-group coupling has a positive impact on group innovation,
3. Inter-group structural hole has a positive impact on group innovation,
4. There is a trade-off between the effects of inter-group structural hole and inter-group coupling on group innovation.
The authors test these four hypotheses using data from OSS. Developers contributing to project tasks in groups other than their own can explore novel ideas for new project creation, because they can benefit from sharing knowledge, whereas developers contributing to project tasks inside their own group exploit ideas to improve those existing projects with better inside-group search possibility; and this demands more developers to join those group projects.

Meta-analysis is a method that allows us to accomplish such a work by combining the results of several studies in order to make an objective synthesis following precise stages. With the help of meta-analysis, we can quantify a global result for the entire studies taken into consideration and obtain a more precise response and a more acceptable generalization.

This paper focuses on the steps of meta-analysis on resumed data, which are used more frequently, because they can easily tend towards exhaustiveness. The synthesis work has to be standardized. It consists in four stages: studies’ research, selection, data extraction and analysis. Its feasibility is linked to the existence of a sufficient number of studies that can be included in this meta-analysis. This method has been used in research since 1970 and it became irreplaceable for making recommendations. Its application field is only limited to that of existent studies.