A Research Model for the Economic Assessment of Inner Source Software Development

Inner source is the use of open-source practices within companies. It enables more efficient software development, shortens time-to-market, and lowers costs through increased company-internal collaboration. While existing studies examine social and organizational impact factors on inner source adoption, only a few have looked at measuring and economically assessing inner source. This article presents an overview of current research regarding inner source, its measurement, economic assessment, and impact on businesses and their processes. Based on a systematic literature review we build a research model for economic inner source assessment. This research model shows thematic dependencies between the economic impact of inner source and its measurement. Additionally, it proposes research questions and hypotheses on measuring, economically assessing, and subsequently adopting inner source

Open source software contributors\u27 motivations in a community of practice

The success of open source software is gaining more attention from software users as well as educators. A variety of open source Software exists for different operating systems (Windows, Macintosh, and Linux) for users in many languages contributed and maintained primarily by volunteers. To learn more about what drives them to devote their time and expertise to creating, debugging, and supporting these widely-used applications, an online survey with Likert-scaled items measuring different types of motivations was distributed to contributors to Mozilla, Moodle, OpenOffice, Koha, and Limesurvey. The survey included comments that were used to check the validity of the Likert-scaled items and open-ended questions that allowed respondents to express their reasons for participating in these open source communities. The Likert-scaled items showed that the open source contributors (n=110, 38 paid and 72 volunteers) are motivated primarily by intrinsic desire: altruism, creation, and learning. Receiving payment for their work did not significantly impact reasons for contributing to OSS projects. The comments and open-ended questions validated the findings and indicated that building a Utopian community--the desire to help for the greater good worldwide--is one of the most important motivators. Also, the freedom to create free software and share a pool of knowledge with those from inside and outside the community is a main reason why contributors join and remain members of open source communities. The conclusion suggests using the community of open source software as an example of collaboration not only in the online learning but also for participation in classrooms

Impact Assessment and Recommendations: Making Sense H2020 CAPS Project

The aim of this report is to address the impact of Making Sense, considering not only citizens and communities involved on the ground level, but also the organizations behind it. We chose to aggregate, summarize and break down our review into five dimensions, adopting a STEEP model and looking into sub-topics inside each of them: Social (Values, representations and practices; Community extension effects; Collective events as awareness raising; Internal communication; Inclusion and fairness; Exchanges and synergies with other organisations), Technoscientific (Open hardware, software and other open tools; Training and education; Materials and tools for local communities; Technical and scientific outputs; Open source platforms), Economic (New entrepreneurial initiatives; Alternative relationships with economic assets; Job creation; Direct exploitation and transfer), Environmental (Igniting environmental changes; Reducing environmental harm; Collective measuring and calibration events; Networking effects; Sustainability plan), Policy (New ways and channels of participation; Communities capacity to impact policy decisions; Organisational influence in political or power dynamics). Through our strategies to measure and assess impact we were able to conclude that Making Sense impact goals were clearly fulfilled, recalling its main intended impacts established at the beginning, first divided in societal objectives: “Make visible and tangible the invisible”, “Understand their environment”, “Turn data and insight into compelling stories & action”, “Using public networks of low cost, open source sensors”, and second into desired results: “Better informed, more engaged citizens”, “Impactful dialogues between citizens and governments”, “More data, more insight, better policies”, “More enjoyable, social, inclusive, healthy & livable cities”.JRC.I.2-Foresight, Behavioural Insights and Design for Polic

An evaluation of the ‘open source internet research tool’: a user-centred and participatory design approach with UK law enforcement

As part of their routine investigations, law enforcement conducts open source research; that is, investigating and researching using publicly available information online. Historically, the notion of collecting open sources of information is as ingrained as the concept of intelligence itself. However, utilising open source research in UK law enforcement is a relatively new concept not generally, or practically, considered until after the civil unrest seen in the UK’s major cities in the summer of 2011. While open source research focuses on the understanding of bein‘publicly available’, there are legal, ethical and procedural issues that law enforcement must consider. This asks the following mainresearch question: What constraints do law enforcement face when conducting open source research? From a legal perspective, law enforcement officials must ensure their actions are necessary and proportionate, more so where an individual’s privacy is concerned under human rights legislation and data protection laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation. Privacy issues appear, though, when considering the boom and usage of social media, where lines can be easily blurred as to what is public and private. Guidance from Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and, now, the National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) tends to be non-committal in tone, but nods towards obtaining legal authorisation under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 when conducting what may be ‘directed surveillance’. RIPA, however, pre-dates the modern era of social media by several years, so its applicability as the de-facto piece of legislation for conducting higher levels of open source research is called into question. 22 semi-structured interviews with law enforcement officials were conducted and discovered a grey area surrounding legal authorities when conducting open source research. From a technical and procedural aspect of conducting open source research, officers used a variety of software tools that would vary both in price and quality, with no standard toolset. This was evidenced from 20 questionnaire responses from 12 police forces within the UK. In an attempt to bring about standardisation, the College of Policing’s Research, Identifying and Tracing the Electronic Suspect (RITES) course recommended several capturing and productivity tools. Trainers on the RITES course, however, soon discovered the cognitive overload this had on the cohort, who would often spend more time learning to use the tools than learn about open source research techniques. The problem highlighted above prompted the creation of Open Source Internet Research Tool (OSIRT); an all-in-one browser for conducting open source research. OSIRT’s creation followed the user-centred design (UCD) method, with two phases of development using the software engineering methodologies ‘throwaway prototyping’, for the prototype version, and ‘incremental and iterative development’ for the release version. OSIRT has since been integrated into the RITES course, which trains over 100 officers a year, and provides a feedback outlet for OSIRT. System Usability Scale questionnaires administered on RITES courses have shown OSIRT to be usable, with feedback being positive. Beyond the RITES course, surveys, interviews and observations also show OSIRT makes an impact on everyday policing and has reduced the burden officers faced when conducting opens source research. OSIRT’s impact now reaches beyond the UK and sees usage across the globe. OSIRT contributes to law enforcement output in countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia and even Israel, demonstrating OSIRT’s usefulness and necessity are not only applicable to UK law enforcement. This thesis makes several contributions both academically and from a practical perspective to law enforcement. The main contributions are: • Discussion and analysis of the constraints law enforcement within the UK face when conducting open source research from a legal, ethical and procedural perspective. • Discussion, analysis and reflective discourse surrounding the development of a software tool for law enforcement and the challenges faced in what is a unique development. • An approach to collaborating with those who are in ‘closed’ environments, such as law enforcement, to create bespoke software. Additionally, this approach offers a method of measuring the value and usefulness of OSIRT with UK law enforcement. • The creation and integration of OSIRT in to law enforcement and law enforcement training packages

Mining software repositories: measuring effectiveness and affectiveness in software systems.

Software Engineering field has many goals, among them we can certainly deal with monitoring and controlling the development process in order to meet the business requirements of the released software artifact. Software engineers need to have empirical evidence that the development process and the overall quality of software artifacts is converging to the required features. Improving the development process's Effectiveness leads to higher productivity, meaning shorter time to market, but understanding or even measuring the software de- velopment process is an hard challenge. Modern software is the result of a complex process involving many stakeholders such as product owners, quality assurance teams, project manager and, above all, developers. All these stake- holders use complex software systems for managing development process, issue tracking, code versioning, release scheduling and many other aspect concerning software development. Tools for project management and issues/bugs tracking are becoming useful for governing the development process of Open Source soft- ware. Such tools simplify the communications process among developers and ensure the scalability of a project. The more information developers are able to exchange, the clearer are the goals, and the higher is the number of developers keen on joining and actively collaborating on a project. By analyzing data stored in such systems, researchers are able to study and address questions such as: Which are the factors able to impact the software productivity? Is it possible to improve software productivity shortening the time to market?. The present work addresses two major aspect of software development pro- cess: Effectiveness and Affectiveness. By analyzing data stored in project man- agement and in issue tracking system of Open Source Communities, we mea- sured the Effectiveness as the time required to resolve an issue and analyzed factors able to impact it

Mining software repositories: measuring effectiveness and affectiveness in software systems.

Software Engineering field has many goals, among them we can certainly deal with monitoring and controlling the development process in order to meet the business requirements of the released software artifact. Software engineers need to have empirical evidence that the development process and the overall quality of software artifacts is converging to the required features. Improving the development process's Effectiveness leads to higher productivity, meaning shorter time to market, but understanding or even measuring the software de- velopment process is an hard challenge. Modern software is the result of a complex process involving many stakeholders such as product owners, quality assurance teams, project manager and, above all, developers. All these stake- holders use complex software systems for managing development process, issue tracking, code versioning, release scheduling and many other aspect concerning software development. Tools for project management and issues/bugs tracking are becoming useful for governing the development process of Open Source soft- ware. Such tools simplify the communications process among developers and ensure the scalability of a project. The more information developers are able to exchange, the clearer are the goals, and the higher is the number of developers keen on joining and actively collaborating on a project. By analyzing data stored in such systems, researchers are able to study and address questions such as: Which are the factors able to impact the software productivity? Is it possible to improve software productivity shortening the time to market?. The present work addresses two major aspect of software development pro- cess: Effectiveness and Affectiveness. By analyzing data stored in project man- agement and in issue tracking system of Open Source Communities, we mea- sured the Effectiveness as the time required to resolve an issue and analyzed factors able to impact it

Mining software repositories to determine the impact of team factors on the structural attributes of software

This thesis was submitted for the award of PhD and was awarded by Brunel University LondonSoftware development is intrinsically a human activity and the role of the development team has been established as among the most decisive of all project success factors. Prior research has proven empirically that team size and stability are linked to stakeholder satisfaction, team productivity and fault-proneness. Team size is usually considered a measure of the number of developers that modify the source code of a project while team stability is typically a function of the cumulative time that each team member has worked with their fellow team members. There is, however, limited research investigating the impact of these factors on software maintainability - a crucial aspect given that up to 80% of development budgets are consumed in the maintenance phase of the lifecycle. This research sheds light on how these aspects of team composition influence the structural attributes of the developed software that, in turn, drive the maintenance costs of software. This thesis asserts that new and broader insights can be gained by measuring these internal attributes of the software rather than the more traditional approach of measuring its external attributes. This can also enable practitioners to measure and monitor key indicators throughout the development lifecycle taking remedial action where appropriate. Within this research the GoogleCode open-source forge is mined and a sample of 1,480 Java projects are selected for further study. Using the Chidamber and Kemerer design metrics suite, the impact of development team size and stability on the internal structural attributes of software is isolated and quantified. Drawing on prior research correlating these internal attributes with external attributes, the impact on maintainability is deduced. This research finds that those structural attributes that have been established to correlate to fault-proneness - coupling, cohesion and modularity - show degradation as team sizes increase or team stability decreases. That degradation in the internal attributes of the software is associated with a deterioration in the sub-attributes of maintainability; changeability, understandability, testability and stability