The impact of project capabilities on project performance: Case of open source software projects

Open Source Software (OSS) projects are contingent on volunteer developers and voluntary contributions from users, accordingly, traditional performance measures used for software projects, like being on time and budget, and satisfying specifications, may not be relevant for such projects. Although researchers have studied some predictors of OSS project performance, there is a lack of empirical work that studies the impact of project capabilities on the performance of OSS projects. Therefore, this paper studies project capabilities as potential predictors of OSS project performance. The data, gathered from 607 OSS projects over time (in two snap-shots), were consistent with Dynamic Capability Theory (DCT). In other words, the results showed that in order to achieve higher project performance, OSS projects need to have strong capabilities in terms of proactive and efficient defect-removal as well as proactive and efficient functionality-enhancement. The implications of these results for the OSS research community are discussed, followed by recommendations for OSS practitioners. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. APM and IPMA. All rights reserved.