Discovering Determinants of Project Participation in an Open Source Social Network

Successful open source software projects often require a steady supply of self motivated software developers. However, little work has been done from a relational/network perspective to study the factors that drive the developers to participate in OSS projects. In this paper, we investigate the participation dynamics in a social network, particularly in an online open source community called Ohloh. Through a REST-based API, we collected information about 11,530 open source software projects involving 94,330 developers. Using social network analysis and statistical analysis methods, we examine a set of social and technical factors in the Ohloh dataset, which we define as the determinants that significantly influence the developers’ participation choices. We found that the determinants include (1)homophily in programming language, (2)project mutual acquaintance, and (3)project age. In addition, our research findings provide the possibility of predicting developers’ participation choices based on the discovered determinants, and therefore can have important implications for OSS project management and in designing social network enabled recommendation systems

A Comparison of Evaluation Networks and Collaboration Networks in Open Source Software Communities

The open source software (OSS) development communities have experienced rapid growth in recent years. Previous social network studies on OSS communities focused on collaboration relationships. However, information about how OSS community members perceive each other is largely ignored. In this study, we report an empirical investigation of the evaluation network in an online OSS community which includes over 11,800 OSS projects and more than 94,330 developers. A collaboration network is modeled from this data set and analyzed for comparison purposes. We find the evaluation network is significantly different from collaboration network in average degree, average path length and fragmentation rate. Furthermore, we argue that the evaluation networks can be used to locate expertise - skillful developers in OSS communities and capture important social relationships among the developers missed in the collaboration network. These characteristics of the evaluation network may benefit the research of OSS development communities and expert recommendation systems

A Study on Maturity Model of Open Source Software Community to Estimate the Quality of Products

AbstractOpen Source Software (OSS) is a new paradigm to develop software by community, in which groups of developer collaborating each other. The method becomes very popular because the products of OSS projects, such as source code, documents, results of tests, are published by open-license. One of noticeable features of OSS is openness of project. Anyone can access the products of OSS projects. It is expected that the quality of products could be higher than those developed by conventional methods, as more people access OSS products and the chance to find defect could be larger. However, there are no established methods for the evaluation of OSS, neither actual terms of the evaluation of OSS. We propose an evaluation method, which is based on the maturity model of OSS development community

On the Socio-Technical Dependencies in Free/Libre/Open Source Software Projects

During the course of the past two decades, Open Source Software (OSS) development model has lead to a number of projects which have produced software that rivals and in some cases even exceeds the scale and quality of the traditional software projects. Among others, Eclipse, Apache, Linux, and BSD operating system are representative examples of such success stories.However, OSS project like traditional in-house projects, often pose the potential for enormous problems, whose effects run the gamut from immense cumulative delay through complete breakdown and failure. This situation is evident, as OSS development is a socio-technical endeavor and is non-trivial. Such development occurs within an intensively collaborative process, in which technical prowess must go hand in hand with the efficient coordination and management of a large number of social, inter-personal interactions across the development organization. Furthermore, those social and technical dimensions are not orthogonal. It has been recognized that the structure of a software product and the layout of the development organization working on that product correlate.Therefore this thesis argue that a comprehensive understanding on the sustainable evolution of OSS projects can be gained through the examination of the mutual influence of social and technical dimensions in OSS development. Thus, the goal of this thesis is the verification and reasoning of the following proposition,“The evolution of the Open Source Software (OSS) project is constrained by the non-orthogonal evolution of Social and Technical dimensions (often termed as Socio-Technical dependency) of such projects”.In concrete terms, this thesis investigates and measures empirically the extent to which the two dimensions of OSS projects, social and technical, approximate and influence each other during the evolution of the projects. Perceived insight is then used to build proposals that would provide empirical basis to frame theory around the affirmed proposition.Moving towards this goal, this thesis proposes models, methods, frameworks and tool supports to measure, assess, and reason the socio-technical dependency within OSS project context. The starting point is to propose a data model to mimic the social and technical dimensions and their inter-relationships. This model is instantiated through the repository data of OSS projects that represent each of these dimensions. Then, methods and a mathematical model are proposed to derive dependency between the two dimensions, and to utilize them in measuring socio-technical dependency quantitatively. These proposals are then put into practice within distinct OSS project contexts to empirically measure and investigate socio-technical dependency. Along the process, frameworks, architectural design and corresponding tool implementations are provided to automate the analysis and visualization of such dependency.Reported results suggest that high degree of socio-technical congruence can be considered as the implicit underlying principle for building team collaboration and coordination within the developer community of long lived OSS projects. Even being highly distributed community of developers, and mostly using passive communication channels, OSS communities are tied together by maintaining task dependent communication. Such communication is often ad-hoc, adaptive and situated as it cope with rapid and continuous changes in the underlying software.Additionally, collaboration among projects are significantly influenced by the resembling properties among the projects. Resembling properties (e.g., project domain, size, and programming language) often form a favorable ground, thus creating a stimuli for developers to participate in those projects

A model-based approach to language integration

The interactions of several languages within a soft- ware system pose a number of problems. There is several anecdotal and empirical evidence supporting such concerns. This paper presents a solution to achieve proper language integration in the context of language workbenches and with limited effort. A simple example is presented to show how cross- language constraints can be addressed and the quality of the support attainable, which covers error-checking and refactoring. A research agenda is then presented, to support future work in the area of language integration, taking advantage of modern language workbenches features