#22739 Research - Pants Truck Factor New discussion created by Abutler101 ## pants Truck Factor For part of my PhD in Information Security, focusing on Software Supply Chain Risk, I calculate the Truck Factor of several Open-Source GitHub repositories. This work builds upon prior work by Avelino et al. Truck (or Bus etc.) Factor is a metric used to identify the minimum number of contributors to a project that would need to depart to stall the project. For more details on how our approach differs from existing state-of-the-art estimators, please see the pre-print of our precursor paper: https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/publications/measuring-software-resilience-using-socially-aware-truck-factor-e For the Full Participant Information Sheet please see the participant information sheet available on the survey's GitHub Repo https://github.com/Abutler101/truckfactor-survey. Direct link to information sheet: https://github.com/Abutler101/truckfactor-survey/blob/main/approved-participant-info-sheet.pdf. Using our methodology, we estimate pants' Truck Factor to be: 11. The contributors identified as part of this Truck Factor value are: • Eric Arellano • Stu Hood • Benjy Weinberger • John Sirois • Tom Dyas • Andreas Stenius • Josh Cannon • Daniel Wagner-Hall • Danny McClanahan • Huon Wilson • Coveralls To validate our estimate, we would appreciate the input of pants' Contributors on the following questions 1. Do you agree with the provided Truck Factor estimate and identified contributors? 2. If you disagree with the Truck Factor estimate, what do you think the Truck Factor is for pants? 3. Do you agree that if the listed contributors left the pants project, it would be in trouble? By creating a comment addressing 1 or more of the above questions in this GitHub Issue, you are consenting for that comment to be considered as part of the consensus response of this project. Thank you in advance for your engagement, Alexis Butler PhD Student Information Security Group, Royal Holloway University of London, UK alexis.butler.2023@live.rhul.ac.uk https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/persons/alexis-butler ### Withdrawal Guidance It is up to you to decide whether you wish to take part or not. You can choose not to participate in this study without any consequences and without needing to give a reason. Community Members: You can withdraw your participation at any point by deleting your comments on the GitHub Issue soliciting responses. However, please note that if your comments have been quoted by other users, the text may still be visible on this thread. Project owners: You can withdraw your project from the dataset at any point up until 1st February 2026 (at which point the dataset will be published), by deleting the Issue Created by the Primary Researcher. You are welcome to delete the issue at any time. While deleting the Issue after 1st February 2026 will not trigger removal from the dataset, it will remove public evidence of the discussion that yielded the consensus values captured by the dataset. pantsbuild/pants