ICPC 2026
Sun 12 - Mon 13 April 2026 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
co-located with ICSE 2026
Sun 12 Apr 2026 10:10 - 10:30 at Europa II - Opening + Keynote + MIP Award

Truck Factor (TF) is a metric proposed by the agile community as a tool to identify concentration of knowledge in software development environments. It states the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. In other words, TF helps to measure how prepared is a project to deal with developer turnover. Despite its clear relevance, few studies explore this metric. Altogether there is no consensus about how to calculate it, and no supporting evidence backing estimates for systems in the wild. To mitigate both issues, we propose a novel (and automated) approach for estimating TF-values, which we execute against a corpus of 133 popular project in GitHub. We later survey developers as a means to assess the reliability of our results. Among others, we find that the majority of our target systems (65%) have TF  2. Surveying developers from 67 target systems provides confidence towards our estimates; in 84% of the valid answers we collect, developers agree or partially agree that the TF’s authors are the main authors of their systems; in 53% we receive a positive or partially positive answer regarding our estimated truck factors.

Sun 12 Apr

Displayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change

09:00 - 10:30
Opening + Keynote + MIP AwardICPC Program / MIP Award at Europa II
09:00
10m
Talk
Opening Message from the Chairs
ICPC Program

09:10
60m
Keynote
When AI Gets It *Almost* Right: Lessons from AI-Assisted Software Development
ICPC Program
Sarah Nadi New York University Abu Dhabi
Media Attached
10:10
20m
Awards
A Novel Approach for Estimating Truck Factors
MIP Award
Guilherme Amaral Avelino Federal University of Piaui, Leonardo Passos University of Waterloo, Canada, Andre Hora UFMG, Marco Tulio Valente Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Link to publication DOI