Betti Lorenzo, Gallo Luca, Wachs Johannes, Battiston Federico
Department of Network and Data Science, Central European University, Vienna, Austria.
ANETI Lab, Corvinus Institute for Advanced Studies (CIAS), Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary.
Nat Commun. 2025 Apr 27;16(1):3956. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-59031-7.
From science to industry, teamwork plays a crucial role in knowledge production and innovation. Most studies consider teams as static groups of individuals, thereby failing to capture how the micro-dynamics of collaborative processes and organizational changes determine team success. Here, we leverage fine-grained temporal data on software development teams from three software ecosystems - Rust, JavaScript, and Python - to gain insights into the dynamics of online collaborative projects. Our analysis reveals an uneven workload distribution in teams, with stronger heterogeneity correlated with higher success, and the early emergence of a lead developer carrying out the majority of work. Moreover, we find that a sizeable fraction of projects experience a change of lead developer, with such a transition being more likely in projects led by inexperienced users. Finally, we show that leadership change is associated with faster success growth. Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of the link between team evolution and success in collaborative processes.
从科学领域到工业界，团队合作在知识生产和创新中发挥着至关重要的作用。大多数研究将团队视为个体的静态组合，因此未能捕捉到协作过程和组织变革的微观动态如何决定团队的成功。在此，我们利用来自Rust、JavaScript和Python这三个软件生态系统的软件开发团队的细粒度时间数据，以深入了解在线协作项目的动态。我们的分析揭示了团队中工作量分布不均的情况，更强的异质性与更高的成功率相关，并且早期会出现承担大部分工作的主导开发者。此外，我们发现相当一部分项目会经历主导开发者的变更，这种转变在由经验不足的用户主导的项目中更有可能发生。最后，我们表明领导力的变化与更快的成功增长相关。我们的工作有助于更深入地理解团队演变与协作过程中的成功之间的联系。
