A four stage approach towards speeding GitHub OSS development

Many open source software (OSS) project creators adopt GitHub as their chosen online repository. They seek out others within the global OSS community of developers. Such community developers are then encouraged to add their capabilities, ideas and coding into a creator’s developing OSS project. A structural equation modelling study of three top OSS programming languages deploys GitHub’s operational elements as a four stage directional suite of (1) dependent, (2) intermediaries, and (3) independent elements. It shows a project’s activity levels can be enhanced when additional project contributions are effectively stage-wise pursued. A staged development approach helps creators understand the process of attracting OSS developers into a creator’s GitHub project

GitHub: Factors Influencing Project Activity Levels

Open source software projects typically extend the capabilities of their software by incorporating code contributions from a diverse cross-section of developers. This GitHub structural path modelling study captures the current top 100 JavaScript projects in operation for at least one year or more. It draws on three theories (information integration, planned behavior, and social translucence) to help frame its comparative path approach, and to show ways to speed the collaborative development of GitHub OSS projects. It shows a project’s activity level increases with: (1) greater responder-group collaborative efforts, (2) increased numbers of major critical project version releases, and (3) the generation of further commits. However, the generation of additional forks negatively impacts overall project activity levels

The importance of socio-technical resources for software ecosystems management

AbstractSoftware Ecosystem (SECO) is often understood as a set of actors interacting among themselves and manipulating artifacts with the support of a common technology platform. Usually, SECO approaches can be designed as an environment whose component repository is gathering stakeholders as well as software products and components. By manipulating software artifacts, a technical network emerges from interactions made over the component repository in order to reuse artifacts, improving code quality, downloading, selling, buying etc. Although technical repositories are essential to store SECO’s artifacts, the interaction among actors in an emerging social network is a key factor to strengthen the SECO’s through increasing actor’s participation, e.g., developing new software, reporting bugs, and communicating with suppliers. In the SECO context, both the internal and external actors keep the platform’s components updated and documented, and even support requirements and suggestions for new releases and bug fixes. However, those repositories often lack resources to support actors’ relationships and consequently to improve the reuse processes by stimulating actors’ interactions, information exchange and better understanding on how artifacts are manipulated by actors. In this paper, we focused on investigating SECO as component repositories that include socio-technical resources. As such, we present a survey that allowed us to identify the relevance of each resource for a SECO based on component repositories, initially focused on the Brazilian scenario. This paper also describes the analysis of the data collected in that survey. Information of other SECO elements extracted from the data is also presented, e.g., the participants’ profile and how they behave within a SECO. As an evolution of our research, a study for evaluating the availability and the use of such resources on top of two platforms was also conducted with experts in collaborative development in order to analyze the usage of the most relevant resources in real SECO’s platforms. We concluded that socio-technical resources have aided collaboration in software development for SECO, coordination of teams based on more knowledge of actor’s tasks and interactions, and monitoring of quality of SECOs’ platforms through the orchestration of the contributions developed by external actors

Open source software GitHub ecosystem: a SEM approach

Open source software (OSS) is a collaborative effort. Getting affordable high-quality software with less probability of errors or fails is not far away. Thousands of open-source projects (termed repos) are alternatives to proprietary software development. More than two-thirds of companies are contributing to open source. Open source technologies like OpenStack, Docker and KVM are being used to build the next generation of digital infrastructure. An iconic example of OSS is 'GitHub' - a successful social site. GitHub is a hosting platform that host repositories (repos) based on the Git version control system. GitHub is a knowledge-based workspace. It has several features that facilitate user communication and work integration. Through this thesis I employ data extracted from GitHub, and seek to better understand the OSS ecosystem, and to what extent each of its deployed elements affects the successful development of the OSS ecosystem. In addition, I investigate a repo's growth over different time periods to test the changing behavior of the repo. From our observations developers do not follow one development methodology when developing, and growing their project, and such developers tend to cherry-pick from differing available software methodologies. GitHub API remains the main OSS location engaged to extract the metadata for this thesis's research. This extraction process is time-consuming - due to restrictive access limitations (even with authentication). I apply Structure Equation Modelling (termed SEM) to investigate the relative path relationships between the GitHub- deployed OSS elements, and I determine the path strength contributions of each element to determine the OSS repo's activity level. SEM is a multivariate statistical analysis technique used to analyze structural relationships. This technique is the combination of factor analysis and multiple regression analysis. It is used to analyze the structural relationship between measured variables and/or latent constructs. This thesis bridges the research gap around longitude OSS studies. It engages large sample-size OSS repo metadata sets, data-quality control, and multiple programming language comparisons. Querying GitHub is not direct (nor simple) yet querying for all valid repos remains important - as sometimes illegal, or unrepresentative outlier repos (which may even be quite popular) do arise, and these then need to be removed from each initial OSS's language-specific metadata set. Eight top GitHub programming languages, (selected as the most forked repos) are separately engaged in this thesis's research. This thesis observes these eight metadata sets of GitHub repos. Over time, it measures the different repo contributions of the deployed elements of each metadata set. The number of stars-provided to the repo delivers a weaker contribution to its software development processes. Sometimes forks work against the repo's progress by generating very minor negative total effects into its commit (activity) level, and by sometimes diluting the focus of the repo's software development strategies. Here, a fork may generate new ideas, create a new repo, and then draw some original repo developers off into this new software development direction, thus retarding the original repo's commit (activity) level progression. Multiple intermittent and minor version releases exert lesser GitHub JavaScript repo commit (or activity) changes because they often involve only slight OSS improvements, and because they only require minimal commit/commits contributions. More commit(s) also bring more changes to documentation, and again the GitHub OSS repo's commit (activity) level rises. There are both direct and indirect drivers of the repo's OSS activity. Pulls and commits are the strongest drivers. This suggests creating higher levels of pull requests is likely a preferred prime target consideration for the repo creator's core team of developers. This study offers a big data direction for future work. It allows for the deployment of more sophisticated statistical comparison techniques. It offers further indications around the internal and broad relationships that likely exist between GitHub's OSS big data. Its data extraction ideas suggest a link through to business/consumer consumption, and possibly how these may be connected using improved repo search algorithms that release individual business value components

An agile information flow consolidator for delivery of quality software projects: technological perspective from a South African start-up

In today’s knowledge-based economy, modern organisations understand the importance of technology in their quest to be considered global leaders. South African markets like others worldwide are regularly flooded with the latest technology trends which can complicate the acquisition, use, management and maintenance of software. To achieve a competitive edge, companies tend to leverage agile methods with the best possible combination of innovative supporting tools as a key differentiator. Software technology firms are in this light faced with determining how to leverage technology and efficient development processes for them to consistently deliver quality software projects and solutions to their customer base. Previous studies have discussed the importance of software development processes from a project management perspective. African academia has immensely contributed in terms of software development and project management research which has focused on modern frameworks, methodologies as well as project management techniques. While the current research continues with this tradition by presenting the pertinence of modern agile methodologies, it additionally further describes modern agile development processes tailored in a sub-Saharan context. The study also aims novelty by showing how innovative sometimes disruptive technology tools can contribute to producing African software solutions to African problems. To this end, the thesis contains an experimental case study where a web portal is prototyped to assist firms with the management of agile project management and engineering related activities. Literature review, semi-structure interviews as well as direct observations from the industry use case are used as data sources. Underpinned by an Activity Theory analytical framework, the qualitative data is analysed by leveraging content and thematic oriented techniques. This study aims to contribute to software engineering as well as the information systems body of knowledge in general. The research hence ambitions to propose a practical framework to promote the delivery of quality software projects and products. For this thesis, such a framework was designed around an information system which helps organizations better manage agile project management and engineering related activities.Information SciencePh. D. (Information Systems

The global Information technology report 2015: ICTs for inclusive growth

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are transforming our economies and societies. Since 2001, The Global Information and Technology Report series and the Networked Readiness Index (NRI) have been taking the pulse of the ICT revolution worldwide. The NRI identifies the capacity of countries to leveraging ICT, by assessing the overall political and business environment, the level of ICT readiness and usage of ICT among the population, businesses and government, as well as the overall impacts of ICTs on the economy and society at large. The 2015 results, which covers 143 economies, confirms the dominance of advanced economies and the persistence of the multiple-faceted digital divides not only across but also within economies. They reveal the pervasive digital poverty that deprives the neediest from the opportunities offered by ICTs. Beyond this diagnosis, under the theme “ICTs for Inclusive Growth”, the 2015 edition of the report provides solutions from leading experts and practitioners to alleviate digital poverty and make the ICT revolution a global reality.&nbsp