Why Software Projects need Heroes (Lessons Learned from 1000+ Projects)

A "hero" project is one where 80% or more of the contributions are made by the 20% of the developers. Those developers are called "hero" developers. In the literature, heroes projects are deprecated since they might cause bottlenecks in development and communication. However, there is little empirical evidence on this matter. Further, recent studies show that such hero projects are very prevalent. Accordingly, this paper explores the effect of having heroes in project, from a code quality perspective by analyzing 1000+ open source GitHub projects. Based on the analysis, this study finds that (a) majority of the projects are hero projects; and (b)the commits from "hero developers" (who contribute most to the code) result in far fewer bugs than other developers. That is, contrary to the literature, heroes are standard and very useful part of modern open source projects.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineerin