Heroes in FLOSS Projects: An Explorative Study

It is well recognized that the presence of Heroes, i.e., tireless developers who are the only ones who know certain critical parts of a system, can increase the risk of project failure, especially if these developers decide to leave the project. Instead, the relationship between Heroes and maintenance tasks is unknown because little investigated so far. In this paper, we first have implemented a tool to identify Heroes. Then, we have conducted an explorative study with 37 randomly selected open source projects to discover existing relationships between the presence of Heroes and the time required to implement change requests. Preliminary results show that: (i) Heroes are common in FLOSS projects and (ii) their presence seems to be beneficial because reduce the time to implement change requests.