Current issues and research trends on open-source software communities

Open source software (OSS) projects represent a new paradigm of software creation and development based on hundreds or even thousands of developers and users organised in the form of a virtual community. The success of an OSS project is closely linked to the successful organisation and development of the virtual community of support group. This paper reviews different fields and research topics related to the OSS communities such as collective intelligence, the structure of OSS communities, their success, communities as virtual organisations, motivation, shared knowledge, innovation and learning. The main challenges, results obtained, and the knowledge areas are detailed for each topi

We Don't Need Another Hero? The Impact of "Heroes" on Software Development

A software project has "Hero Developers" when 80% of contributions are delivered by 20% of the developers. Are such heroes a good idea? Are too many heroes bad for software quality? Is it better to have more/less heroes for different kinds of projects? To answer these questions, we studied 661 open source projects from Public open source software (OSS) Github and 171 projects from an Enterprise Github. We find that hero projects are very common. In fact, as projects grow in size, nearly all project become hero projects. These findings motivated us to look more closely at the effects of heroes on software development. Analysis shows that the frequency to close issues and bugs are not significantly affected by the presence of project type (Public or Enterprise). Similarly, the time needed to resolve an issue/bug/enhancement is not affected by heroes or project type. This is a surprising result since, before looking at the data, we expected that increasing heroes on a project will slow down howfast that project reacts to change. However, we do find a statistically significant association between heroes, project types, and enhancement resolution rates. Heroes do not affect enhancement resolution rates in Public projects. However, in Enterprise projects, the more heroes increase the rate at which project complete enhancements. In summary, our empirical results call for a revision of a long-held truism in software engineering. Software heroes are far more common and valuable than suggested by the literature, particularly for medium to large Enterprise developments. Organizations should reflect on better ways to find and retain more of these heroesComment: 8 pages + 1 references, Accepted to International conference on Software Engineering - Software Engineering in Practice, 201

Women at University top management levels. New legal context and equity plans

El propósito de este trabajo ha sido identificar las principales barreras que dificultan el acceso equitativo de las mujeres a los niveles directivos superiores en las universidades españolas, favoreciendo una realidad generalmente conocida y asumida de desigualdad de género en estos órganos de gobierno. Para ello se ha empleado la técnica científica de elaboración de mapas conceptuales (Trochim, 1989). El empleo de esta metodología, innovadora en su aplicación en esta área, nos ha permitido conocer tanto las causas como una serie de posibles soluciones a la problemática tratada. Así pues, los resultados del trabajo ponen de relieve la necesidad de acometer las líneas estratégicas en las distintas políticas de igualdad, en las que se haga especial énfasis en la subsanación de determinadas debilidades y amenazas, detectadas a partir del empleo de la metodología utilizada, en aras del logro de la igualdad efectiva de género. Unos resultados que, a su vez, pueden ser considerados como punto de partida para el diseño de políticas de igualdad real y efectiva en el ámbito del gobierno de universidades públicas y privadas de muchos países.This research aims to identify the main barriers that make the access of women to top management levels in Universities difficult. These barriers promote the generally known and assumed reality of gender inequality in these governing bodies. A scientific method, Concept Mapping (Trochim, 1989) has been used to this aim. This methodolog y, whose use is new in this field of research, has allowed us to identify both the causes and possible solutions. Results highlight the need to undertake strategic lines in policies of equality, focusing on eliminating certain weaknesses and threats detected, in order to achieve effective gender equality. These results, in turn, can also be considered as a starting point in the design of real and effective equality governmental university gender policies in many countriesMinisterio de Educación y Ciencia EA2009-003

Identification of Influencers in eWord-of-Mouth communities using their Online Participation Features

[EN] The identification of influencers in any type of online social network is of paramount importance, as they can significantly affect consumers’ purchasing decisions. This paper proposes the utilization of a self-designed web scraper to extract meaningful information for the identification of influencers and the analysis of how this new set of variables can be used to predict them. The experimental results from the Ciao UK website will be used to illustrate the proposed approach and to provide new insights in the identification of influencers. Obtained results show the importance of the trust network, but considering the intensity and the quality of both trustors and trustees.Olmedilla, M.; Arenas-Márquez, FJ.; Martinez-Torres, MR.; Toral, SL. (2016). Identification of Influencers in eWord-of-Mouth communities using their Online Participation Features. En CARMA 2016: 1st International Conference on Advanced Research Methods in Analytics. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 38-45. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2016.2016.3642OCS384

Topological properties of the core group in online communities

Online communities are self-organized networks with a clear core-periphery structure, where most of the contributions are due to a small group of users known as the core group. Although several methods for detecting the coreperiphery structure have been proposed, all of them assume a pre-defined structure of the core group. However, online communities exhibit a wide variety of organizations and shapes, and the patterns of behavior of the core group is continuously changing. This paper investigates the relationship between the global parameters of the community and those of the core group. Findings reveal that the behavior of the core group determines the global structure of the community and therefore, the identification of the core group should consider the global characteristics of the network in which they are contributing

A quantitative study of the evolution of open source software communities

Typically, virtual communities exhibit the well-known phenomenon of participation inequality, which means that only a small percentage of users is responsible of the majority of contributions. However, the sustainability of the community requires that the group of active users must be continuously nurtured with new users that gain expertise through a participation process. This paper analyzes the time evolution of Open Source Software (OSS) communities, considering users that join/abandon the community over time and several topological properties of the network when modeled as a social network. More specifically, the paper analyzes the role of those users rejoining the community and their influence in the global characteristics of the network

Analysis of activity in open-source communities using social network analysis techniques

The success of an open-source software project is closely linked to the successful organization and development of the underlying virtual community. In particular, participation is the most important mechanism by which the development of the project is supported. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the online participation in virtual communities using social network analysis techniques in order to obtain the main patterns of behaviour of users within communities. Several open-source communities related to Linux ports to embedded processors have been studied, obtaining a set of indicators by modelling them as a social network. Exploratory factor analysis has been used to extract the main dimensions related to the participation process. Participation inequality, hierarchy and the cohesion of the community constitute the main dimensions characterizing the participation mechanism within communities. Obtained results highlight the necessity of guiding the organization and development of the community to achieve successful target softwareJunta de Andalucía. Consejería de Economía, Innovación, Ciencia y Empleo P12-SEJ-32

Big data and virtual communities: methodological issues

Virtual communities represent today en emergent phenomenon through which users get together to create ideas, to obtain help from one another, or just to casually engage in discussions. Their increasing popularity as well as their utility as a source of business value and marketing strategies justify the necessity of defi ning some specifi c methodologies for analyzing them. The aim of this paper is providing new insights into virtual communities from a methodological viewpoint, highlighting the main trends and challenge

Mujeres en órganos de gobierno universitarios. Nuevo contexto normativo y políticas de igualdad

El propósito de este trabajo ha sido identificar las principales barreras que dificultan el acceso equitativo de las mujeres a los niveles directivos superiores en las universidades españolas, favoreciendo una realidad generalmente conocida y asumida de desigualdad de género en estos órganos de gobierno. Para ello se ha empleado la técnica científica de elaboración de mapas conceptuales (Trochim, 1989). El empleo de esta metodología, innovadora en su aplicación en esta área, nos ha permitido conocer tanto las causas como una serie de posibles soluciones a la problemática tratada. Así pues, los resultados del trabajo ponen de relieve la necesidad de acometer las líneas estratégicas en las distintas políticas de igualdad, en las que se haga especial énfasis en la subsanación de determinadas debilidades y amenazas, detectadas a partir del empleo de la metodología utilizada, en aras del logro de la igualdad efectiva de género. Unos resultados que, a su vez, pueden ser considerados como punto de partida para el diseño de políticas de igualdad real y efectiva en el ámbito del gobierno de universidades públicas y privadas de muchos países

Application of text mining techniques to the analysis of discourse in eWOM communications from a gender perspective

The emergence of online user-generated content has raised numerous questions about discourse gender differences as compared to face-to-face interactions. The intended gender-free equality of Internet has been challenged by numerous studies, and significant differences have been found in online communications. This paper proposes the application of text mining techniques to online gender discourse through the analysis of shared reviews in electronic word-of-mouth communities (eWOM), which is a form of user-generated content. More specifically, linguistic issues, sentiment analysis and content analysis were applied to online reviews from a gender perspective. The methodological approach includes gathering online reviews, pre-processing collected reviews and a statistical analysis of documents features to extract the differences between male and female discourses in a specific product category. Findings reveal not only the discourse differences between women and men but also their different preferences and the feasibility of predicting gender using a set of frequent key terms. These findings are interesting both for retailers so they can adapt their offer to the gender of customers, and for online recommender systems, as the proposed methodology can be used to predict the gender of users in those cases where the gender is not explicitly stated