Developing and Managing Open Source Enterprise Systems through Open Superposition: A Digital Options and Technical Debt Perspective

In the context of open source enterprise systems (OS-ES), we present and test a conceptual framework to explain how to effectively develop and manage software as an ongoing engagement. The nature of OS-ES development makes traditional governance and coordination activities more difficult to realize. Collaboration through open superposition is an emergent view of how OS-ES development can be orchestrated. We draw on digital options and technical debt literature as a lens to understand the development and management of OS-ES as a superposed workflow. Building upon open superposition theory, we empirically investigate the mutual relationships between realized digital options, resolved technical debt, and number of contributors through panel vector autoregressions (PVAR) analysis. Our findings suggest that the mutual influences between realized options and resolved debt are critical for OS-ES success. We also find that existing contributors have short-term positive and long-term negative impacts on option realization in mature OS-ES.