Version Control in Online Software Repositories

Software version control repositories provide a uniform and stable interface to manage documents and their version histories. Unfortunately, Open Source systems, for example, CVS, Subversion, and GNU Arch are not well suited to highly collaborative environments and fail to track semantic changes in repositories. We introduce document provenance as our Description Logic framework to track the semantic changes in software repositories and draw interesting results about their historic behaviour using a rule-based inference engine. To support the use of this framework, we have developed our own online collaborative tool, leveraging the fluency of the modern WikiWikiWeb

Case Studies in Industry: What We Have Learnt

Case study research has become an important research methodology for exploring phenomena in their natural contexts. Case studies have earned a distinct role in the empirical analysis of software engineering phenomena which are difficult to capture in isolation. Such phenomena often appear in the context of methods and development processes for which it is difficult to run large, controlled experiments as they usually have to reduce the scale in several respects and, hence, are detached from the reality of industrial software development. The other side of the medal is that the realistic socio-economic environments where we conduct case studies -- with real-life cases and realistic conditions -- also pose a plethora of practical challenges to planning and conducting case studies. In this experience report, we discuss such practical challenges and the lessons we learnt in conducting case studies in industry. Our goal is to help especially inexperienced researchers facing their first case studies in industry by increasing their awareness for typical obstacles they might face and practical ways to deal with those obstacles.Comment: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Conducting Empirical Studies in Industry, co-located with ICSE, 201

Eprints and the Open Archives Initiative

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was created as a practical way to promote interoperability between eprint repositories. Although the scope of the OAI has been broadened, eprint repositories still represent a significant fraction of OAI data providers. In this article I present a brief survey of OAI eprint repositories, and of services using metadata harvested from eprint repositories using the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH). I then discuss several situations where metadata harvesting may be used to further improve the utility of eprint archives as a component of the scholarly communication infrastructure.Comment: 13 page

Some issues in the 'archaeology' of software evolution

During a software project's lifetime, the software goes through many changes, as components are added, removed and modified to fix bugs and add new features. This paper is intended as a lightweight introduction to some of the issues arising from an `archaeological' investigation of software evolution. We use our own work to look at some of the challenges faced, techniques used, findings obtained, and lessons learnt when measuring and visualising the historical changes that happen during the evolution of software

Embracing the future: embedding digital repositories in the University of London

Digital repositories can help Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to develop coherent and coordinated approaches to capture, identify, store and retrieve intellectual assets such as datasets, course material and research papers. With the advances of technology, an increasing number of Higher Education Institutions are implementing digital repositories. The leadership of these institutions, however, has been concerned about the awareness of and commitment to repositories, and their sustainability in the future. This study informs a consortium of thirteen London institutions with an assessment of current awareness and attitudes of stakeholders regarding digital repositories in three case study institutions. The report identifies drivers for, and barriers to, the embedding of digital repositories in institutional strategy. The findings therefore should be of use to decision-makers involved in the development of digital repositories. Our approach was entirely based on consultations with specific groups of stakeholders in three institutions through interviews with specific individuals. The research in this report was prepared for the SHERPA-LEAP Consortium and conducted by RAND Europe

Some issues in the 'archaeology' of software evolution

During a software project's lifetime, the software goes through many changes, as components are added, removed and modified to fix bugs and add new features. This paper is intended as a lightweight introduction to some of the issues arising from an `archaeological' investigation of software evolution. We use our own work to look at some of the challenges faced, techniques used, findings obtained, and lessons learnt when measuring and visualising the historical changes that happen during the evolution of software