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Bus factor

The bus factor, also known as the truck factor, is a metric in software engineering that quantifies the minimum number of key developers whose sudden unavailability—envisioned as being "hit by a bus"—would critically impair or halt a project's progress due to concentrated institutional knowledge.^[1] This concept underscores the vulnerability of projects to personnel turnover, emphasizing the need for distributed expertise to ensure continuity and resilience.^[2] Originating in the software engineering community at the start of the 2000s, the term draws from a metaphorical scenario to highlight risks in both proprietary and open-source environments, where a low bus factor (e.g., 1) signals high dependency on individuals.^[2]^[3] A project's bus factor is typically calculated by analyzing code authorship, contributions, and knowledge distribution across repositories, often using algorithms that simulate the loss of top contributors to identify when critical functionality becomes unmaintainable.^[1]^[3] High bus factors, ideally exceeding 2 or 3, promote antifragility by encouraging practices like code reviews, pair programming, and documentation to spread expertise, thereby mitigating risks from attrition, illness, or burnout.^[1] In open-source software, where voluntary participation amplifies turnover concerns, tools like bus factor analyzers evaluate Git repositories to guide onboarding and succession planning, ensuring long-term sustainability.^[4] The metric's relevance extends beyond coding to broader organizational health, influencing hiring, training, and risk management strategies in technology teams.^[2]

Fundamentals

Definition

The bus factor refers to the minimum number of essential team members whose abrupt departure or incapacitation—such as due to illness, resignation, or an accident—would halt or severely impair a project's progress.^[5] This metric quantifies the vulnerability arising from over-reliance on a small group of individuals who possess critical knowledge or skills indispensable to the team's operations.^[6] The term draws from the metaphorical expression "hit by a bus," which vividly illustrates the catastrophic impact of an unforeseen loss of personnel, underscoring the fragility of projects dependent on irreplaceable contributors.^[7] In practice, a low bus factor signals high risk, as it highlights concentrated expertise that, if lost, leaves the remaining team unable to sustain momentum or resolve key challenges.^[8] Primarily applied in software development and open-source projects, the bus factor serves as an indicator of knowledge distribution and individual dependencies within collaborative environments, where specialized technical insights are often held by few.^[6] It emphasizes the need for resilience against human-centric disruptions in dynamic, team-driven workflows. The concept is sometimes interchangeably termed the "truck factor," a variant that conveys the same idea of sudden, multiple personnel losses.^[9] Its earliest documented discussion occurred in the Python community mailing list.^[10]

Origins and History

The concept underlying the bus factor originated in the open-source software community in June 1994, when a discussion on the Python mailing list expressed concerns about the project's vulnerability due to its heavy dependence on creator Guido van Rossum, the "Benevolent Dictator for Life." In a thread titled "If Guido was hit by a bus?", contributor Michael McLay highlighted the risks of such single-person reliance, noting that commercial entities might view the project as unstable without broader involvement, prompting suggestions for formalizing Python as an Internet standard to mitigate these issues.^[11] During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the idea gained traction within other open-source communities, including Perl and Linux projects, where developers discussed project sustainability and the dangers of key contributor loss. For instance, by 2004, open-source practitioners were using the "bus factor" as a humorous yet pointed way to critique projects lacking distributed coding contributions, emphasizing how concentrated expertise could lead to abandonment if lead developers departed unexpectedly.^[12] Similar concerns appeared in Linux-related writings, such as analyses of the "Linus Torvalds bus factor," underscoring the need for community involvement to sustain kernel development beyond its primary maintainer.^[13] The term "truck factor"—often used interchangeably with "bus factor"—was formalized in software engineering literature around 2003, particularly in the context of agile methodologies. In the book Pair Programming Illuminated, Laurie Williams and Robert Kessler, citing James Coplien, defined it as the minimum number of developers who must be removed before a project stalls, positioning it as a key metric for assessing knowledge distribution in pair programming practices. Between 2005 and 2010, the concept appeared in empirical studies and agile resources, such as the 2010 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement paper on computing truck factors using version control data, which provided algorithmic approaches to quantify it and integrated it into broader software maintainability assessments. By the 2010s, the bus factor expanded beyond software to general business and technical team management, becoming a standard risk assessment tool in project management frameworks. This broadening was influenced by the rise of remote work trends, especially post-2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which amplified challenges in knowledge sharing and heightened awareness of single-point failures in distributed teams.^[14]^[8]

Assessment

Calculation Methods

The basic qualitative method for calculating bus factor involves identifying critical knowledge areas within a project, such as specific codebase modules, deployment processes, or architectural components, and then determining the number of individuals knowledgeable in each area. Knowledge is typically assessed through team surveys, interviews, or documentation reviews to gauge expertise levels. The bus factor is then defined as the lowest count of knowledgeable individuals across all these areas, highlighting the most vulnerable dependency. A quantitative method, often applied to codebases, relies on contribution analysis from version control systems like Git to estimate bus factor. This approach identifies the smallest number of developers whose removal would result in over 50% of project files becoming unmaintained, where unmaintained files are those without commits from the remaining developers in a recent period, such as the last 12 months. Developers are ranked by their overall contributions, and the bus factor is the size of the minimal set whose departure crosses this 50% threshold, providing an objective measure of knowledge concentration. Weighted scoring refines these calculations by assigning weights to project components based on their impact, such as centrality in the codebase or frequency of use, to prioritize core elements over peripheral ones. For instance, core modules might receive higher weights reflecting their influence on project stability. The bus factor is then computed as the minimum over weighted components of the number of developers deemed knowledgeable, adjusting for significance to yield a more nuanced risk assessment.^[15] An example formula for the basic case across components is:

\text{Bus factor} = \min_{C} \left| \{ D \mid D \text{ has contributed } > [\theta](/page/Threshold) \text{ to } C \} \right|

where C ranges over project components, D over developers, and \theta is a threshold such as 10% of total commits to C, ensuring only substantial contributors are counted. This formulation, adaptable to weighted variants by incorporating component weights into the minimization, originates from analyses of repository data to quantify expertise distribution.

Tools and Metrics

Several open-source tools have been developed to automate the computation of bus factor in software projects, primarily by analyzing Git repository data such as commit history and authorship patterns. One prominent example is the BusFactor analyzer from the Software Observatory and Monitoring group, which scans Git repositories to evaluate developer expertise on files and modules through incremental weighting of code modifications over time.^[16] This tool determines the bus factor by identifying the minimum number of developers whose removal would result in significant knowledge loss, often using file ownership metrics derived from commit authorship rather than full dependency graphs.^[17] Another tool, Bus Factor Explorer, developed by JetBrains Research, provides a web-based interface and API for exploring bus factor in GitHub projects by processing commit histories to model knowledge distribution across files and subsystems.^[18] It visualizes risks via treemaps and supports turnover simulations to assess potential project stalling under developer departures.^[19] These tools integrate seamlessly with platforms like GitHub's API, enabling automated bus factor reporting within continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. For instance, Bus Factor Explorer's API allows developers to fetch and compute metrics programmatically, facilitating scheduled scans or triggers on repository events such as pushes or pull requests to monitor knowledge concentration in real time.^[18] Similarly, tools like the Truck-Factor estimator leverage GitHub API data on commits to calculate bus factor, supporting extensions into CI/CD workflows for ongoing project health assessments without dedicated plugins for environments like SonarQube.^[20] Advanced metrics extend traditional bus factor analysis to address nuances like maintainer succession and long-term resilience. The Pony factor, a variant metric, is the smallest number of contributors responsible for 50% of the commits in a given period (e.g., the past two years), quantifying the risk if those key individuals depart.^[10] Some tools incorporate turnover simulations—akin to integrating developer churn rates—to predict bus factor decline; for example, Bus Factor Explorer simulates scenarios of contributor exits to forecast knowledge gaps and potential project slowdowns based on historical activity patterns.^[18] Recent tools, such as DEV-EYE (presented in 2024), monitor bus factor using git commit history with flexible visualizations to identify potential risks.^[21] A notable case study illustrates the practical impact of these tools on identifying vulnerabilities, particularly in open-source ecosystems. In a 2022 analysis by Metabase of the top 1,000 GitHub repositories ranked by stars, over 40% of projects had a bus factor of 1, with bus factors generally low (around 65% ≤2) but machine learning libraries often exhibiting higher values (e.g., 10 or more).^[22] Tools like Bus Factor Explorer applied to these repositories reveal supply chain security risks, as low bus factors in widely depended-upon projects could lead to unmaintained dependencies, amplifying vulnerabilities across downstream applications and underscoring the need for proactive monitoring.^[18]^[6]

Risks and Importance

Associated Risks

A low bus factor heightens the vulnerability of software projects to failure by creating dependencies on a small number of individuals, leading to development delays and potential complete halts in progress upon their departure. This concentration of expertise results in the loss of critical institutional knowledge, making it difficult for remaining team members to continue effectively without extensive ramp-up time. In cases where the bus factor is 1, the project encounters a single point of failure, severely compromising continuity and increasing the likelihood of overall project abandonment.^[23] Beyond direct project stalls, a low bus factor amplifies broader organizational and ecosystem-level threats, including the accumulation of technical debt from deferred maintenance on complex codebases that few can navigate. Unmaintained components under such conditions heighten security vulnerabilities, as bugs may go undetected and unpatched for extended periods due to limited expertise. This risk extends to supply chain disruptions, where dependencies on low bus factor projects can cascade failures across numerous applications; for example, the 2016 removal of the npm left-pad package by its sole maintainer temporarily broke builds for thousands of JavaScript projects, underscoring how individual actions in trivial yet critical dependencies can propagate widespread interruptions.^[24] The human elements of low bus factor further compound these issues, as the sudden loss of key contributors imposes overwhelming workloads on survivors, contributing to burnout and diminished team morale from heightened stress and isolation in knowledge silos. Organizations then face elevated recruitment and onboarding costs to replace specialized talent, often exacerbating delays as new hires struggle to absorb lost expertise amid ongoing pressures.^[25]^[26] Real-world incidents illustrate these perils vividly in open-source contexts, such as the 2014 Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL, where a low bus factor—stemming from reliance on just a handful of developers—allowed a severe memory leak bug to persist undetected for over two years, delaying patches and enabling potential data theft across millions of internet-connected systems.^[27] More recently, the 2024 XZ Utils backdoor incident highlighted similar risks, where influence over a single maintainer nearly introduced a critical vulnerability into a widely used compression library, potentially compromising Linux distributions and supply chains due to concentrated contributor control.^[28] In corporate environments, the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s intensified turnover and absence-related risks for software teams, as remote work arrangements exposed dependencies on key individuals, contributing to stalled sprints, eroded collaboration, and accelerated technical debt.^[29]

Role in Project Management

In modern project management, the bus factor integrates with agile and DevOps principles by promoting knowledge distribution to mitigate single points of failure. Within agile frameworks, teams leverage sprint retrospectives to evaluate dependencies on individual contributors, using the metric to guide backlog prioritization toward tasks that enhance cross-training and collaboration.^[30] Similarly, DevOps practices emphasize shared responsibility and automation, which inherently raise the bus factor by fostering environments where multiple team members can handle deployment and maintenance activities without disruption.^[31] As a key risk indicator, the bus factor is incorporated into broader risk management frameworks, such as those outlined in ISO 31000, where it supports ongoing monitoring of personnel-related vulnerabilities. Project managers track bus factor trends over time as a performance metric, integrating it into risk registers to quantify the potential impact of turnover or absence on project timelines and deliverables.^[30]^[32] This approach allows organizations to prioritize resilience, treating low bus factors as actionable risks akin to those in supply chain disruptions. In open-source ecosystems, the bus factor plays a vital role in ensuring project sustainability, with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) evaluating it as part of project health assessments to gauge contributor diversity and reduce stalling risks.^[33] For instance, CNCF guidelines highlight the need for contributions to be spread across sufficient individuals to avoid disruption from key departures, promoting long-term viability. Similarly, the OWASP Top 10 Risks for Open Source Software identifies bus factor as a critical concern for unmaintained third-party components and reliance on limited contributors, guiding security practices in software supply chains.^[34] In enterprise settings, particularly tech firms, maintaining a high bus factor minimizes the effects of employee turnover, preserving institutional knowledge and operational continuity amid high attrition rates.^[4] Post-2020, the shift to hybrid work models has amplified the bus factor's relevance, as distributed teams face greater challenges in informal knowledge transfer, yet digital tools for collaboration enable proactive monitoring of dependencies across global workforces.^[4] Addressing risks like knowledge silos enhances overall project resilience and adaptability.

Improvement Strategies

Knowledge sharing techniques at the individual and team levels play a crucial role in distributing expertise across software development projects, thereby elevating the bus factor by reducing reliance on single contributors. These methods emphasize practical, hands-on approaches to transfer critical knowledge, ensuring project continuity even in the face of personnel changes. By focusing on documentation, collaborative coding practices, structured guidance, and simulated scenarios, teams can foster collective ownership of codebases and processes. Documentation practices form a foundational technique for mitigating single-person dependencies in software projects. Creating modular code comments, wikis, and onboarding guides enables team members to access and understand complex systems without direct intervention from original authors. For instance, comprehensive documentation replaces tacit expert knowledge, though its effectiveness depends on maintaining organization and quality to avoid obsolescence. In a survey of 269 software engineers, documentation was identified as a key knowledge-sharing strategy for addressing low bus factor risks, particularly for at-risk project components. Wikis and guides facilitate self-directed learning during onboarding, allowing newcomers to quickly grasp architectural decisions and implementation details, thus broadening expertise distribution. Pair programming and code reviews promote peer involvement in critical tasks, building collective expertise through real-time collaboration. In pair programming, two developers work together on the same codebase, alternating roles between driver (coding) and navigator (reviewing and guiding), which facilitates immediate knowledge exchange and harmonizes technical understanding across the team. This practice reduces misunderstandings, enhances communication, and directly increases the bus factor by enabling multiple members to serve as backups for key functionalities. Code reviews complement this by mandating peer scrutiny of changes, exposing contributors to diverse coding styles and domain knowledge while mentoring juniors. Engineers in practice report that such collaborative rotations between project areas yield high-impact improvements in knowledge diffusion, as validated in empirical studies of agile teams. Mentorship programs provide structured opportunities for juniors to pair with experts on essential modules, incorporating rotation to cultivate multiple proficient owners. These initiatives involve formal pairings where senior developers guide novices through codebases, sharing insights on design rationale and troubleshooting via talks, sessions, or joint problem-solving. Effective mentorship enhances onboarding efficiency and project resilience by transferring specialized knowledge, with rotation ensuring no single expert dominates a module. Research on software engineering education highlights e-mentoring and implicit guidance as scalable variants that sustain knowledge flow in distributed teams, ultimately elevating bus factor through widespread competency development. In surveyed engineering contexts, organizing expert-led talks on vulnerable areas was ranked among the top strategies for proactive knowledge dissemination. Training simulations, often termed "bus drills" or off-boarding exercises, involve teams practicing responses to simulated key member absences to identify and address knowledge gaps. These drills replicate turnover scenarios, prompting participants to handle tasks without unavailable experts, thereby revealing dependencies and necessitating immediate knowledge transfer. Tools for such simulations analyze code ownership to highlight high-risk areas, guiding refactoring efforts paired with team training to redistribute expertise. By proactively simulating losses, teams prioritize onboarding to hotspots and foster adaptability, with practitioners noting their role in maintaining maintainability during actual disruptions.

Organizational Practices

Organizations adopt hiring and cross-training policies to cultivate redundancy in skills and mitigate knowledge silos in software development teams. By recruiting developers with overlapping expertise, companies ensure that critical knowledge is not concentrated in individual roles, thereby enhancing project resilience. ^[7] Cross-training mandates that team members learn multiple roles, fostering a broader distribution of capabilities and reducing dependence on single contributors. Succession planning involves identifying key roles and grooming backups through structured mentoring and performance-integrated development programs. This approach minimizes knowledge loss from turnover by assigning successors who can assume responsibilities with minimal disruption. Cultural shifts toward a "no hero" ethos emphasize collective responsibility over individual heroism, promoting knowledge transfer as a core value. Organizations incentivize this through mechanisms like bonuses for documentation and sharing contributions, which encourage behaviors that distribute expertise across teams. ^[35] ^[36] Such cultures positively influence knowledge sharing, leading to improved software process outcomes. ^[35] Monitoring and auditing practices include regular bus factor assessments during annual reviews to evaluate project vulnerability. These audits analyze contributor involvement in repositories to identify low bus factors, triggering interventions like team restructuring if thresholds—such as a bus factor of 1—are met. Studies of GitHub projects have shown that many exhibit a low bus factor, such as 1, underscoring the need for proactive monitoring.

References

[1]
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09828
[2]
Understanding Core Developer Turnover in Open Source Software
May 14, 2025 · The concept of truck factor (or bus factor) was first used in the context of software engineering at the start of the millennium and was defined ...
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[PDF] Algorithms for Estimating Truck Factors: A Comparative Study - UFMG
The measure is also known as Bus Factor/Number or Lottery Factor. ... The interest of Software Engineering community in studying knowledge of code is due to many ...
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[PDF] Bus Factor In Practice - arXiv
ABSTRACT. Bus factor is a metric that identifies how resilient is the project to the sudden engineer turnover. It states the minimal number of en-.Missing: origin | Show results with:origin
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Bus Factor | DevIQ
A project's bus factor (or truck factor) is a number equal to the number of team members who, if run over by a bus, would put the project in jeopardy.
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Bus Factor: A Human-Centered Risk Metric in the Software Supply ...
Feb 6, 2022 · The “bus factor” is defined as the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due ...
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What Is the Bus Factor, Why It Matters and How to Increase It - Swimm
The bus factor is a measure of the risk associated with the knowledge concentration in a team or organization.Why Is the Bus Factor Important? · How Can You Measure the...
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What Is Bus Factor Risk and How Can You Avoid It? - Indeed
The “bus factor” is a term used to describe the number of people who could be “run over by a bus” before your project would be in danger of failure.
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Aug 28, 2024 · Pay down technical debt in code with a low bus factor. By simplifying the code, you're also reducing the impact should the main developer leave.
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Jul 7, 2004 · In open source development people joke about the 'bus' factor. Projects which don't have coding 'spread' are considered less sound should their single lead ...
[13]
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[PDF] Assessing the Bus Factor of Git Repositories - Hal-Inria
Our formula has two different components to give more flexibility to the calculation process. We first calculate the primary key developers and then the ...<|separator|>
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Mar 12, 2024 · Bus factor (BF) is a metric that tracks knowledge distribution in a project. It is the minimal number of engineers that have to leave for a ...Missing: analyzer | Show results with:analyzer
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JetBrains-Research/bus-factor-explorer - GitHub
A web app for exploring Bus Factor of GitHub projects by analyzing the commit history. - JetBrains-Research/bus-factor-explorer.Missing: analyzer | Show results with:analyzer
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aserg-ufmg/Truck-Factor - GitHub
This is a tool for estimating the Truck Factor of GitHub projects, using information from commit history. Truck Factor (also known as Bus Factor or Lottery ...Missing: integration API
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Indicators have thus been proposed. These include the bus factor (also called truck factor), the pony factor and the elephant factor (Ferreira et al., 2019;.
[22]
Bus factor of top GitHub projects - Metabase
Nov 14, 2022 · The Bus factor is the number of people on a project that would have to be hit by a bus (or quit) before the project is in serious trouble.<|control11|><|separator|>
[23]
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Software development projects face a lot of risks (requirements inflation, poor scheduling, technical problems, etc.). Underestimating those risks may put ...
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Our model generated through a large-scale survey can guide organizations in how to reduce workforce burnout by creating a climate for learning, inclusiveness in ...
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Jun 17, 2024 · There's a resource risk that should be on your project risk register, regardless of the type of project you are doing. That's your bus factor.
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DevOps keeps the bus factor high (and the leather pants factor low!)
Apr 8, 2021 · Think of the bus factor as one of the many canaries in the mineshaft that will alert you to the presence of unhealthy organizational patterns in ...
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This study explores the relationship among knowledge incentive mechanisms, knowledge psychological ownership, and individual knowledge creation behavior. This ...<|separator|>