Measuring software projects Mayan style

The progress of contemporary software projects is a subject to several different measurements. These measurements are often subjective and rely on developers´ personal predictions. In addition, software projects are assumed to progress linearly from the beginning to an end. This can be a good approximation of progress in projects with rigid and clearly defined and planned deliverables or deadlines, but is not sufficient for application in community-driven loosely defined projects. In this paper, we are proposing an alternative cyclical view on measuring progress in software development. Based on cyclical time perceptions from other fields of life, we analysed 23 open source software projects to find reoccurring patterns in open source software projects. The empirically derived cyclical and event-based measurements of software projects´ progress does not suffer from the linear approximation issues seen with many other measurements. Accordingly, we believe that the derived progress modelling technique describes community-driven software better as it adapts to environmental changes and lends itself for building estimations on the projects´ future.