Coordination Implications of Software Coupling in Open Source Projects

The effect of software coupling on the quality of software has been studied quite widely since the seminal paper on software modularity by Parnas [1]. However, the effect of the increase in software coupling on the coordination of the developers has not been researched as much. In commercial software development environments there normally are coordination mechanisms in place to manage the coordination requirements due to software dependencies. But, in the case of Open Source software such coordination mechanisms are harder to implement, as the developers tend to rely solely on electronic means of communication. Hence, an understanding of the changing coordination requirements is essential to the management of an Open Source project. In this paper we study the effect of changes in software coupling on the coordination requirements in a case study of a popular Open Source project called JBoss

Similarities, challenges and opportunities of wikipedia content and open source projects

Copyright @ 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Several years of research and evidence have demonstrated that Open Source Software (OSS) portals often contain a large amount of software projects that simply do not evolve, developed by relatively small communities, struggling to attract a sustained number of contributors. These portals have started to increasingly act as a storage for abandoned projects, and researchers and practitioners should try and point out how to take advantage of such content. Similarly, other online content portals (like Wikipedia) could be harvested for valuable content. In this paper we argue that, even with differences in the requested expertise, many projects reliant on content and contributions by users undergo a similar evolution, and follow similar patterns: when a project fails to attract contributors, it appears to be not evolving, or abandoned. Far from a negative finding, even those projects could provide valuable content that should be harvested and identified based on common characteristics: by using the attributes of “usefulness” and “modularity” we isolate valuable content in both Wikipedia pages and OSS projects

The Architecture of Complexity Revisited: Design Primitives for Ultra-Large-Scale Systems

As software-intensive systems continue to grow in scale and complexity the techniques that we have used to design and analyze them in the past no longer suffice. In this paper we look at examples of existing ultra-large-scale systems—systems of enormous size and complexity. We examine instances of such systems that have arisen spontaneously in nature and those that have been human-constructed. We distill from these example systems the design primitives that underlie them. We capture these design primitives as a set of tactics— fundamental architectural building-blocks—and argue that to efficiently build and analyze such systems in the future we should strongly consider employing such building-blocks

Evaluación cuantitativa de F/OSS para la reutilización

El software Libre o de Código Abierto (F/OSS, por sus siglas en inglés) ha alcanzado amplia difusión, a partir de la calidad de algunos de sus productos. Este constituye una fuente abundante y accesible de software a bajo costo, no obstante, potencialmente podrían servir de base para nuevos desarrollos. A través de este proyecto proponemos fundamentalmente recopilar y desarrollar métricas que ayuden a evaluar proyectos F/OSS con miras a la reutilización, integrándolos en un marco de evaluación. El marco a desarrollar estará orientado principalmente a la información que puede extraerse del código fuente y de la evolución de los proyectos de software en cuestión.Eje: Ingeniería de SoftwareRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Evolution and prospects of the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) package ecosystem

Free and open source software package ecosystems have existed for a long time, but such collaborative development practice has surged in recent years. One of the oldest and most popular package ecosystems is Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), the repository of packages of the statistical language R, a popular statistical computing environment. CRAN stores a large number of packages that are updated regularly and depend on many other packages in a complex graph of relations. As the repository grows, its sustainability could be threatened by that complexity or nonuniform evolution of some packages. This paper provides an empirical analysis of the evolution of the CRAN repository in the last 20 years, considering the laws of software evolution and the effect of CRAN's policies on such development. Results show how the progress of CRAN is consistent with the laws of continuous growth and change and how there seems to be a relevant increase in complexity in recent years. Significant challenges are raising related to the scale and scope of software package managers and the services they provide; understanding how they change over time and what might endanger their sustainability are key factors for their future improvement, maintenance, policies, and, eventually, sustainability of the ecosystem

Evolución de F/OSS: estudio de caso múltiple sobre el crecimiento

La disponibilidad de datos propia de los proyectos de Software Libre y de Código Abierto (F/OSS por sus siglas en inglés) posibilita realizar investigaciones reproducibles, al tiempo que habilitan un tratamiento estadístico poco frecuente en la investigación en ingeniería de Software. En este trabajo analizamos el ritmo de crecimiento del tamaño de un grupo de productos F/OSS a lo largo de sucesivas versiones, e indagamos sobre la posible relación entre ese crecimiento y un indicador de acoplamiento.XIII Workshop Ingeniería de Software (WIS).Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Evolución de F/OSS: estudio de caso múltiple sobre el crecimiento

La disponibilidad de datos propia de los proyectos de Software Libre y de Código Abierto (F/OSS por sus siglas en inglés) posibilita realizar investigaciones reproducibles, al tiempo que habilitan un tratamiento estadístico poco frecuente en la investigación en ingeniería de Software. En este trabajo analizamos el ritmo de crecimiento del tamaño de un grupo de productos F/OSS a lo largo de sucesivas versiones, e indagamos sobre la posible relación entre ese crecimiento y un indicador de acoplamiento.XIII Workshop Ingeniería de Software (WIS).Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Evolución de F/OSS: estudio de caso múltiple sobre el crecimiento

La disponibilidad de datos propia de los proyectos de Software Libre y de Código Abierto (F/OSS por sus siglas en inglés) posibilita realizar investigaciones reproducibles, al tiempo que habilitan un tratamiento estadístico poco frecuente en la investigación en ingeniería de Software. En este trabajo analizamos el ritmo de crecimiento del tamaño de un grupo de productos F/OSS a lo largo de sucesivas versiones, e indagamos sobre la posible relación entre ese crecimiento y un indicador de acoplamiento.XIII Workshop Ingeniería de Software (WIS).Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI