Tools and Datasets for Mining Libre Software Repositories

Thanks to the open nature of libre (free, open source) software projects, researchers have gained access to a rich set of data related to various aspects of software development. Although it is usually publicly available on the Internet, obtaining and analyzing the data in a convenient way is not an easy task, and many considerations have to be taken into account. In this chapter we introduce the most relevant data sources that can be found in libre software projects and that are commonly studied by scholars: source code releases, source code management systems, mailing lists and issue (bug) tracking systems. The chapter also provides some advice on the problems that can be found when retrieving and preparing the data sources for a later analysis, as well as information about the tools and datasets that support these tasks.

Simulation-Based Study of Community Governance and Conflict Management in Emerging Global Participatory Science Communities

Despite significant research in open innovation, much less is known about why and how collective creativity emerges in open source scientific communities, as relatively little is known about organizing processes in such cyber-enabled Global Participatory Science (GPS) communities. One of the significant problems in understanding emergence of innovation involves how GPS communities govern and coordinate to maximize innovation output. We conduct an agent simulation study to examine the impact of culture and conflict management styles on collective creativity. Findings suggest that decentralized coordination schemes such as emergent selection such as found in utility communities and moderate degrees of assertiveness and cooperation for conflict management result in higher incidence of innovation.

What Makes Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Projects Successful?

The last few years have seen a rapid increase in the number of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Some of these projects, such as Linux and the Apache web server, have become phenomenally successful. However, for every successful FLOSS project there are dozens of FLOSS projects which never succeed. These projects fail to attract developers and/or consumers and, as a result, never get off the ground. The aim of this research is to better understand why some FLOSS projects flourish while others wither and die. This article presents a simple agent-based model that is calibrated on key patterns of data from SourceForge, the largest online site hosting open source projects. The calibrated model provides insight into the conditions necessary for FLOSS success and might be used for scenario analysis of future developments of FLOSS.

Bridging the Gap between Agile and Free Software Approaches

Agile sprints are short events where a small team collocates in order to work on particular aspects of the overall project for a short period of time. Sprinting is a process that has been observed also in Free Software projects: these two paradigms, sharing common principles and values have shown several commonalities of practice. This article evaluates the impact of sprinting on a Free Software project through the analysis of code repository logs: sprints from two Free Software projects (Plone and KDE PIM) are assessed and two hypotheses are formulated: do sprints increase productivity? Are Free Software projects more productive after sprints compared with before? The primary contribution of this article is to show how sprinting creates a large increase in productivity both during the event, and immediately after the event itself: this argues for more in-depth studies focussing on the nature of sprinting.

Teaching Software Engineering with Free/Libre Open Source Projects

One of the major problems in software engineering education is the involvement of students in real world software projects. Industry projects are a solution, but in many cases they are hard to find and student participation can be problematic due to cultural, familiarization and other practical reasons. The abundance of Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects is a neat solution, offering multi-lingual, multi-cultural environments in virtually every application domain, at different levels of project size, maturity, organization etc. The paper analyzes how acquisition of practical experience on several basic and advanced software engineering topics can be achieved by working in a FLOSS project. The kind of skills that can be acquired are those requested by the Overview Report for Computing Curricula by ACM and topics examined are those of the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, by IEEE. Also software engineering areas that require special care or that may not prove suitable for such treatment are identified. Various isolated teaching cases pertaining to this approach are presented and discussed.1

Integrating Projects from Multiple Open Source Code Forges

Much of the data about free, libre, and open source (FLOSS) software development comes from studies of code forges or code repositories used for managing projects. This paper presents a method for integrating data about open source projects by way of matching projects (entities) across multiple code forges. After a review of the relevant literature, a few of the methods are chosen and applied to the FLOSS domain, including a comparison of some simple scoring systems for pairwise project matches. Finally, the paper describes limitations of this approach and recommendations for future work.

Strategies for Improving Open Source Software Usability

The Open Source Software (OSS) movement has had enormous impact on how software is created and continues to attract interest from researchers, software developers and users. A factor that may be inhibiting OSS from achieving greater success is usability, a fundamental characteristic to user acceptance of software. Motivated by the uniquely user-driven nature of the open source model and the extensive user base that participates in OSS projects, the authors propose an exploratory learning method and an associated web-based inspection environment that enables non-experts to contribute to open source usability inspection. This tool uses pattern-based usability guidelines to help identify usability knowledge during inspection. The method emphasizes outlining and exploration features which the authors have formally evaluated and the results of which are described. Data collected from a qualitative study indicates positive impact of the proposed method in helping end-users inspect software and achieve better results in discovering usability problems.

Open Source and Commercial Software Platforms

In this article, we consider the dynamics and competition between two software platforms (Open Source and proprietary software). Potential user-developers can adopt one of the two platforms in order to develop and sell new applications based on the platform. We consider the static issue first and then use a simple dynamic system where the dynamics comes from the development efforts (spillovers) made on each platforms. In this context, we first identify the conditions for the two platforms to coexist in the long run. From this baseline, we then consider different strategies for the editor. A first strategy is for the editor to “show the code” of its software, so as to develop more compatible products. A second strategy is to strategically monitor the compatibility degree between the proprietary and OS platform. In both cases, we analyse whether a mixed industry may be sustainable in the long run.

Open Source Software Adoption

Current estimates suggest widespread adoption of open source software (OSS) in organizations worldwide. However, the problematic nature of OSS adoption is readily evidenced in the fairly frequent reports of problems, unforeseen hold-ups, and outright abandonment of OSS implementation over time. Hibernia Hospital, an Irish public sector organization, have embarked on the adoption of a range of OSS applications over several years, some of which have been successfully deployed and remain in live use within the organisation, whereas others, despite achieving high levels of assimilation over a number of years, have not been ultimately retained in live use in the organization. Using a longitudinal case study, we discuss in depth the deployment process for two OSS applications – the desktop application suite whose deployment was unsuccessful ultimately, and the email application which was successfully deployed. To our knowledge, this is the first such in-depth study into successful and unsuccessful OSS implementation.

Communication Network Characteristics of Open Source Communities

Empirical research has shown that social network structure is a critical success factor for various kinds of work groups. The authors extended this research to a new type of work group—the open source software project community—with the objective of exploring the role of communication networks within these intriguing projects. Using archival data from 143 open source project groups, the authors compiled six measures of social network structure and analyzed these in relation to four measures of group success. This study found that the social network structures of these project communities did not appear to be critical success factors at all, but rather they had no significant impact on success or their effect was opposite of that seen in prior studies of work groups. Various conjectures were suggested that might explain these results, offering opportunities for further research.