QuESo: A quality model for open source software ecosystems

© 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Open source software has witnessed an exponential growth in the last two decades and it is playing an increasingly important role in many companies and organizations leading to the formation of open source software ecosystems. In this paper we present a quality model that will allow the evaluation of those ecosystems in terms of their relevant quality characteristics such as health or activeness. To design this quality model we started by analysing the quality measures found during the execution of a systematic literature review on open source software ecosystems and, then, we classified and reorganized the set of measures in order to build a solid quality model.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Protocol for a SLR on software ecosystems: technical report

Open Source Software (OSS) and Ecosystems (SECO) are two emergent research areas in software engineering. We are interested on the published works that join these two topics, to do it we used a well-known technique called Systematic Literature Review (SLR).Preprin

The Tennis Shoe Army and Leviathan: Relics and Specters of Big Government in The Road

Differently than many other post-apocalyptic stories, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road offers scant evidence of either the influence of political events or ideas or of an authorial ambition to construct a vision of political order. To the extent that parallels can be drawn between the novel’s presentation of a tennis shoe army on the march, which resembles dream-like processions in other McCarthy novels, and Thomas Hobbes’ vision of an absolutist government as Leviathan, this essay argues that The Road can be seen as conveying an aversion to the impersonal rule of the bureaucratic state

Open source software ecosystems : a systematic mapping

Context: Open source software (OSS) and software ecosystems (SECOs) are two consolidated research areas in software engineering. OSS influences the way organizations develop, acquire, use and commercialize software. SECOs have emerged as a paradigm to understand dynamics and heterogeneity in collaborative software development. For this reason, SECOs appear as a valid instrument to analyze OSS systems. However, there are few studies that blend both topics together. Objective: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the current state of the art in OSS ecosystems (OSSECOs) research, specifically: (a) what the most relevant definitions related to OSSECOs are; (b) what the particularities of this type of SECO are; and (c) how the knowledge about OSSECO is represented. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping following recommended practices. We applied automatic and manual searches on different sources and used a rigorous method to elicit the keywords from the research questions and selection criteria to retrieve the final papers. As a result, 82 papers were selected and evaluated. Threats to validity were identified and mitigated whenever possible. Results: The analysis allowed us to answer the research questions. Most notably, we did the following: (a) identified 64 terms related to the OSSECO and arranged them into a taxonomy; (b) built a genealogical tree to understand the genesis of the OSSECO term from related definitions; (c) analyzed the available definitions of SECO in the context of OSS; and (d) classified the existing modelling and analysis techniques of OSSECOs. Conclusion: As a summary of the systematic mapping, we conclude that existing research on several topics related to OSSECOs is still scarce (e.g., modelling and analysis techniques, quality models, standard definitions, etc.). This situation calls for further investigation efforts on how organizations and OSS communities actually understand OSSECOs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Sochi Olympics, Celebration Capitalism and Homonationalist Pride

In July 2013 the Russian government passed two anti-LGBT laws that drew international criticism. Russia’s impending hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games inspired more sustained international attention to these laws than might have otherwise been the case. In this article, we apply the mutually supporting frameworks of queer/trans necropolitics and celebration capitalism to a content analysis of coverage of the Sochi Olympics in the Advocate and Xtra, the leading LGBT publications in the United States and Canada respectively. We contend that the Advocate and Xtra participated in a homonationalist process of manufacturing consent as the USA, Canada, the West in general and the Olympic Games were glorified while issues relating to racism and colonialism in Russia, the USA and Canada were ignored and these geopolitical formations in general were falsely generalized as safe havens for LGBT people. This conclusion is based on two key observations. First, we noted complete silence about racist and ethnic violence in Russia and in the specific site of Sochi in the Advocate and only one (unelaborated) acknowledgement of Sochi as a historical site of ethnic cleansing in Xtra. Second, in spite of the recent expansion of formal citizenship rights for LGBT people, more uniformly in Canada than in the USA, Advocate and Xtra coverage failed to acknowledge the dissonance between American and Canadian governments positioning themselves as LGBT and human rights leaders and the harm these National Security States continue to deliver to racialized, impoverished and gender and sexual minority populations.&nbsp

Hotel Bukovyna

This collection of short stories and first chapter of a novella take place in the historical area of Bukovyna, the beech tree land, partly located in Chernivetska region, western Ukraine. On the edge of it, or under it, or traveling to and from it, in contemporary time. I\u27ve been occupied with the outsider, represented here, and where the seven stories reside, by the giant grande dame tourist hotel on Main Street, across from Shevchenko Park, in Chernivtsi, the region\u27s city center. The occupants: the outsider looking in and around. Outsiders looking at other outsiders. An outsider being welcomed in. Most of these stories are realistic, concerned with the development of democratic Ukraine and the preservation of its people and culture. I\u27ve pulled poetry, song, fabulist elements, and characters from the national literature and folklore, all in a quest to convey this complicated region

Images of Headship. A narrative inquiry into the construction of identities for Headteachers in all girls’ selective independent schools.

This study is an exploration into how Headteachers, in all-girls’ selective independent schools, construct their professional identities with the aim of gaining an insight into what it is like to be a Headteacher within this context. Whilst there is significant literature concerning leadership, and the concept and process of identity construction, there is little discernible research which explores the experiences and organisational socialisation of Headteachers within this specific context. Therefore, this research contributes significantly to the body of knowledge by studying female Headteachers leading all-girls’ selective independent schools. This study took a narrative inquiry approach to examine the process of socialisation involved in the construction of Headteacher professional identities. Photographic images were used in narrative conversational interviews with four Headteachers; this resulted in interview data which was explored and interpreted for emerging ‘themes’ and ‘signs’. Analysis was informed by theoretical themes developed within communities of practice literature (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The framework of ‘communities of practice’ was used because it underpins personal development and learning as well as the process of socialisation and hence the forming of professional identities. The underlying assumption is that the formation of professional identities occurs via participation and engagement in a context and a community of practice specific to these Headteachers. The themes, that were applied and emerged from the narratives, manifested themselves within the Headteachers’ stories as ‘signs’. Once these signs were identified within the narrative transcriptions, they were analysed for dynamic connections between the signs in order to build what I refer to in this study as ‘identities construction plots’. The findings of this study suggest that the process of socialisation and the construction of a Headteacher’s identities within leadership communities of practice are complex, multifaceted and influenced by many sociocultural and contextual aspects. The concept of a core identity with varying degrees of agency and conformity will be shown to play a part. However, the issue of negotiating multiple identities will also be shown to have caused uncertainty and a potential lack of confidence amongst these Headteachers. Although it is not possible to suggest generalisations from these findings, due to the small number of participants and the personalised nature of the data, the study will be of value to practitioners, educationalists and policymakers. This in-depth and insightful interpretation of the Headteachers’ construction of identities provides colleagues with examples from which they could begin to question, and reflect upon, their own practice and actions within their leadership role

A Systematic Literature Review of Software Visualization Evaluation

Abstract Context: Software visualizations can help developers to analyze multiple aspects of complex software systems, but their effectiveness is often uncertain due to the lack of evaluation guidelines. Objective: We identify common problems in the evaluation of software visualizations with the goal of formulating guidelines to improve future evaluations. Method: We review the complete literature body of 387 full papers published in the SOFTVIS/VISSOFT conferences, and study 181 of those from which we could extract evaluation strategies, data collection methods, and other aspects of the evaluation. Results: Of the proposed software visualization approaches, 62 lack a strong evaluation. We argue that an effective software visualization should not only boost time and correctness but also recollection, usability, engagement, and other emotions. Conclusion: We call on researchers proposing new software visualizations to provide evidence of their effectiveness by conducting thorough (i) case studies for approaches that must be studied in situ, and when variables can be controlled, (ii) experiments with randomly selected participants of the target audience and real-world open source software systems to promote reproducibility and replicability. We present guidelines to increase the evidence of the effectiveness of software visualization approaches, thus improving their adoption rate