> A "hero" project is one where 80% or more of the contributions are made by the 20% of the developers. ... We identify the heroes developer communities in 1100

> A "hero" project is one where 80% or more of the contributions are made by the 20% of the developers. ... We identify the heroes developer communities in 1100+ open source GitHub projects. My scepticism has been piqued to the extent that I call b######t. Open source projects. Projects contributed to by people in their spare time, or perhaps with some corporate backing with developers on the payroll, and often with quite different governance models. Should we therefore be surprised at the widely varying levels of contribution? Should we be surprised that those who do more work on the projects tend to make contributions resulting in fewer bugs, perhaps because they have a much better understanding of the projects due to their greater familiarity with them? Whatever: OSS projects with contributions coming in from all manner of sources outside the core team aren't necessarily terribly similar to having a team of 6 - 8 working on a project full time within a company. The only similarity being that a relatively small core team do most (or all) of the work. Colour me not even slightly surprised. My blunt conclusion is that the idea software projects "need" so-called "hero" developers is extremely questionable based on the data presented[1]. [1] Granted I've done no more than skim the paper but this comment, from page 3, amused me: "Most prior researchers deprecate heroism in software projects." Really? Do they now?