Architecture Information Communication in Two OSS Projects: the Why, Who, When, and What

Architecture information is vital for Open Source Software (OSS) development, and mailing list is one of the widely used channels for developers to share and communicate architecture information. This work investigates the nature of architecture information communication (i.e., why, who, when, and what) by OSS developers via developer mailing lists. We employed a multiple case study approach to extract and analyze the architecture information communication from the developer mailing lists of two OSS projects, ArgoUML and Hibernate, during their development life-cycle of over 18 years. Our main findings are: (a) architecture negotiation and interpretation are the two main reasons (i.e., why) of architecture communication; (b) the amount of architecture information communicated in developer mailing lists decreases after the first stable release (i.e., when); (c) architecture communications centered around a few core developers (i.e., who); (d) and the most frequently communicated architecture elements (i.e., what) are Architecture Rationale and Architecture Model. There are a few similarities of architecture communication between the two OSS projects. Such similarities point to how OSS developers naturally gravitate towards the four aspects of architecture communication in OSS development.Comment: Preprint accepted for publication in Journal of Systems and Software, 202

A Tool for Identifying Swarm Intelligence on a Free/Open Source Software Mailing List

A software tool designed using the concepts of swarm intelligence and text mining is proposed as an aid in the analysis of free/open source software (FOSS) development communities. A prototype of the tool collects textual data from an electronic mailing list, a primary mode of FOSS developer communication. The tool enables a user to compare patterns of discussion topics found in the text with patterns of swarm intelligence. The research of this design is congruent with Madey et al.‟s (2002) observation that the open source software development phenomenon shows an emergent behavior and can be modeled after agent-based, biologically-inspired swarms. The goal of a tool for identifying emergent intelligence on FOSS mailing lists is to increasing the user‟s understanding of a given FOSS development community

Arsonists or firefighters? Affectiveness in agile software development

In this paper, we present an analysis of more than 500K comments from open-source repositories of software systems developed using agile methodologies. Our aim is to empirically determine how developers interact with each other under certain psychological conditions generated by politeness, sentiment and emotion expressed within developers' comments. Developers involved in an open-source projects do not usually know each other; they mainly communicate through mailing lists, chat, and tools such as issue tracking systems. The way in which they communicate a ects the development process and the productivity of the people involved in the project. We evaluated politeness, sentiment and emotions of comments posted by agile developers and studied the communication ow to understand how they interacted in the presence of impolite and negative comments (and vice versa). Our analysis shows that \ re ghters" prevail. When in presence of impolite or negative comments, the probability of the next comment being impolite or negative is 13% and 25%, respectively; ANGER however, has a probability of 40% of being followed by a further ANGER comment. The result could help managers take control the development phases of a system, since social aspects can seriously a ect a developer's productivity. In a distributed agile environment this may have a particular resonance

Predicting Sustainability in Open-Source Projects: A Socio-Technical Approach using EPEX

Open-source projects are pivotal to the innovation and sustainability of software, yet their complex dynamics can be challenging to decipher. Building upon the foundational work of the DECAL group, which demonstrated the utility of socio-technical networks in analyzing the lifecycle of projects, and the APEX tool developed for Apache projects to forecast sustainability, this thesis extends the idea and introduces the Eclipse Project Explorer (EPEX) tool. Employing dual-network models—social and technical—this research explores open-source collaborations within the Eclipse ecosystem. The social network leverages data from mailing lists and other communication platforms to visualize interactions among developers, while the technical network utilizes GitHub commit data to trace file changes, illuminating the evolution of software projects. These networks are visualized over time, offering developers deeper insights into project lifecycles and interaction patterns. Furthermore, we introduce a groundbreaking ‘graduation forecast‘ model that predicts the long-term sustainability of projects based on analytical data. By applying our methodology to selected case studies within Eclipse, our findings not only validate the effectiveness of our approach but also enhance our understanding of project sustainability, providing a robust tool for strategic decision-making in software development. This thesis lays foundational work for future research into the lifecycle management of open-source software, significantly extending prior research

Gender and participation in early stages of the free/open source software joining process

Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is a powerful development paradigm for creating software. Increasingly more FOSS projects, like Firefox and Android, are integrated into mainstream technology. It is important that FOSS projects serve its diverse user base well. Several surveys have found that existing FOSS communities are very homogenous populations and made up of mostly men. There are significantly fewer women participating in FOSS when compared to the percentage of women in computing in general. FOSS communities have a large amount of turnover and must have a continual influx of new developers to keep the project alive and thriving. When a new developer wants to learn more about a project, report a bug or has a question about the project, he or she typically posts a message on a mailing list. Mailing lists are the primary form of communication with FOSS communities, and are the first place where new users interact with the existing community. Building on previous research, we examined one of the first steps of joining a FOSS project, subscribing to a mailing list, and studied posting statistics of females during the early stages of the process. In particular, we explored 6 FOSS projects: Buildroot, Busybox, Jaws, Parrot, Uclibc, and Yum. We found that 8.27% of FOSS list subscribers are women and that significantly fewer posters (6.63%) are women. Women lurked on a list slightly less than men before replying, and remained subscribed for slightly less time to a mailing list

Poster: Communication in Open-Source Projects--End of the E-mail Era?

Communication is essential in software engineering. Especially in distributed open-source teams, communication needs to be supported by channels including mailing lists, forums, issue trackers, and chat systems. Yet, we do not have a clear understanding of which communication channels stakeholders in open-source projects use. In this study, we fill the knowledge gap by investigating a statistically representative sample of 400 GitHub projects. We discover the used communication channels by regular expressions on project data. We show that (1) half of the GitHub projects use observable communication channels; (2) GitHub Issues, e-mail addresses, and the modern chat system Gitter are the most common channels; (3) mailing lists are only in place five and have a lower market share than all modern chat systems combined.Comment: 2 pages. To appear as a poster in 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018) Companion proceeding

Myths and Realities about Online Forums in Open Source Software Development: An Empirical Study

The use of free and open source software (OSS) is gaining momentum due to the ever increasing availability and use of the Internet. Organizations are also now adopting open source software, despite some reservations, in particular regarding the provision and availability of support. Some of the biggest concerns about free and open source software are post release software defects and their rectification, management of dynamic requirements and support to the users. A common belief is that there is no appropriate support available for this class of software. A contradictory argument is that due to the active involvement of Internet users in online forums, there is in fact a large resource available that communicates and manages the provision of support. The research model of this empirical investigation examines the evidence available to assess whether this commonly held belief is based on facts given the current developments in OSS or simply a myth, which has developed around OSS development. We analyzed a dataset consisting of 1880 open source software projects covering a broad range of categories in this investigation. The results show that online forums play a significant role in managing software defects, implementation of new requirements and providing support to the users in open source software and have become a major source of assistance in maintenance of the open source projects

Using open source tools to support collaboration within CALIBRE

Abstract – This paper describes the deployment of Plone, an Open-Source content management system, to support the activities of CALIBRE, an EU-funded coordination action integrating research into Libre software. The criteria by which Plone was selected are described, and the goodness of fit to these criteria is analysed. As a coordination action, CALIBRE involves 12 partners with different requirements and characteristics. The CALIBRE Working Environment (CWE) must therefore support a variety of users with different levels of technical expertise and expectations. Implementation of the support infrastructure for CALIBRE is ongoing, and has provided some interesting insights into the benefits of the use of libre software. Although Plone has not been explicitly developed as a collaboration infrastructure, with its wealth of plugins, it has proven highly adaptable for this purpose