Are developers fixing their own bugs?: Tracing bug-fixing and bug-seeding committers

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 IGI GlobalThe process of fixing software bugs plays a key role in the maintenance activities of a software project. Ideally, code ownership and responsibility should be enforced among developers working on the same artifacts, so that those introducing buggy code could also contribute to its fix. However, especially in FLOSS projects, this mechanism is not clearly understood: in particular, it is not known whether those contributors fixing a bug are the same introducing and seeding it in the first place. This paper analyzes the comm-central FLOSS project, which hosts part of the Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Lightning extensions and Sunbird projects from the Mozilla community. The analysis is focused at the level of lines of code and it uses the information stored in the source code management system. The results of this study show that in 80% of the cases, the bug-fixing activity involves source code modified by at most two developers. It also emerges that the developers fixing the bug are only responsible for 3.5% of the previous modifications to the lines affected; this implies that the other developers making changes to those lines could have made that fix. In most of the cases the bug fixing process in comm-central is not carried out by the same developers than those who seeded the buggy code.This work has been partially funded by the European Commission, under the ALERT project (ICT-258098)

Adolescents’ responses to the promotion and flavouring of e-cigarettes

Objectives The purpose of the study is to examine adolescents’ awareness of e-cigarette marketing and investigate the impact of e-cigarette flavour descriptors on perceptions of product harm and user image. Methods Data come from the 2014 Youth Tobacco Policy Survey, a cross-sectional in-home survey conducted with 11–16 year olds across the UK (n = 1205). Adolescents’ awareness of e-cigarette promotion, brands, and flavours was assessed. Perceptions of product harm, and likely user of four examples of e-cigarette flavours was also examined. Results Some participants had tried e-cigarettes (12 %) but regular use was low (2 %) and confined to adolescents who had also smoked tobacco. Most were aware of at least one promotional channel (82 %) and that e-cigarettes came in different flavours (69 %). Brand awareness was low. E-cigarettes were perceived as harmful (M = 3.54, SD = 1.19) but this was moderated by product flavours. Fruit and sweet flavours were perceived as more likely to be tried by young never smokers than adult smokers trying to quit (p < 0.001). Conclusions There is a need to monitor the impact of future market and regulatory change on youth uptake and perceptions of e-cigarettes

Dynamics of Innovation in an “Open Source” Collaboration Environment: Lurking, Laboring and Launching FLOSS Projects on SourceForge

A systems analysis perspective is adopted to examine the critical properties of the Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) mode of innovation, as reflected on the SourceForge platform (SF.net). This approach re-scales March’s (1991) framework and applies it to characterize the “innovation system” of a “distributed organization” of interacting agents in a virtual collaboration environment. The innovation system of the virtual collaboration environment is an emergent property of two “coupled” processes: one involves interactions among agents searching for information to use in designing novel software products, and the other involves the mobilization of individual capabilities for application in the software development projects. Micro-dynamics of this system are studied empirically by constructing transition probability matrices representing movements of 222,835 SF.net users among 7 different activity states. Estimated probabilities are found to form first-order Markov chains describing ergodic processes. This makes it possible to computate the equilibrium distribution of agents among the states, thereby suppressing transient effects and revealing persisting patterns of project-joining and project-launching.innovation systems, collaborative development environments, industrial districts, exploration and exploitation dynamics, open source software, FLOSS, SourceForge, project-joining, project-founding, Markov chain analysis.

Decision Point Analysis on Learning Process Models in FLOSS mailing Archives

Abstract. Numerous studies continue to explore the potential of social interactions between people in Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) environments. While the dynamics of interactions in these environments can be understood from different perspectives, we put a particular focus on any interactions resulting in knowledge transfer and acquisition. As learning platforms, FLOSS communities provide immense opportunities for improving software engineering skills. People who engage in FLOSS activities both acquire and improve their software development skills. For this reason, it is very helpful to understand how these learning interactions occur. In this paper, we make use of the decision miner in process mining to conduct our analysis. The purpose of such an endeavour is twofold. Firstly, we provide empirical insights into how people learn while exchanging emails in FLOSS mailing archives. Lastly, we go a step further by providing insights behind the motivation into learning participants' decisions on their learning paths

Public Libraries: techno trends and collective memory

By public library I mean here a library providing some kind of universal access to its assets, one whose readership isn’t exclusively tied and restricted to a particular organization – including the generally called public libraries, but also many specialized libraries, such as the academic of the open kind. Despite all efforts, public libraries continue to face strong barriers to their participation in the information society. Participants of the World Meeting on the Future of the ISIS Software recognized that “the ISIS Software Family has a unique technological concept and developmental mission to cope with Information Storage and Retrieval Systems (ISRS), particularly for developing countries where the technology is widely known and used; that the ISIS Software Family has now fully embraced the Free and Open Source Software approach and the support of UNICODE structures to be fully open and multilingual” (Rio Declaration 2008), restating thus the persistent relevance of this software family. OSS (Coar 2006) is defined as software whose source code is freely available, therefore allowing for free inspection and/or utilization, i.e., it is available for study and use by everyone without any payment or any other barrier to access. the lack of technical skill in libraries, a situation that libraries share with much of the public and cultural sectors. The study of OSS ILS, and of the their adaptation to the needs of specific public libraries may be the solution to this. Library Management Systems) that enhances digital archive interoperability between a diverse range of libraries

Community-Based Production of Open Source Software: What Do We Know About the Developers Who Participate?

This paper seeks to close an empirical gap regarding the motivations, personal attributes and behavioral patterns among free/libre and open source (FLOSS) developers, especially those involved in community-based production, and its findings on the existing literature and the future directions for research. Respondents to an extensive web-survey’s (FLOSS-US 2003) questions about their reasons for work on FLOSS are classified according to their distinct “motivational profiles” by hierarchical cluster analysis. Over half of them also are matched to projects of known membership sizes, revealing that although some members from each of the clusters are present in the small, medium and large ranges of the distribution of project sizes, the mixing fractions for the large and the very small project ranges are statistically different. Among developers who changed projects, there is a discernable flow from the bottom toward the very small towards to large projects, some of which is motivated by individuals seeking to improve their programming skills. It is found that the profile of early motivation, along with other individual attributes, significantly affects individual developers’ selections of projects from different regions of the size range.Open source software, FLOSS project, community-based peer production, population heterogeneity, micro-motives, motivational profiles, web-cast surveys, hierarchical cluster analysis

“It Takes All Kinds”: A Simulation Modeling Perspective on Motivation and Coordination in Libre Software Development Projects

This paper presents a stochastic simulation model to study implications of the mechanisms by which individual software developers’ efforts are allocated within large and complex open source software projects. It illuminates the role of different forms of “motivations-at-the-margin” in the micro-level resource allocation process of distributed and decentralized multi-agent engineering undertakings of this kind. We parameterize the model by isolating the parameter ranges in which it generates structures of code that share certain empirical regularities found to characterize actual projects. We find that, in this range, a variety of different motivations are represented within the community of developers. There is a correspondence between the indicated mixture of motivations and the distribution of avowed motivations for engaging in FLOSS development, found in the survey responses of developers who were participants in large projects.free and open source software (FLOSS), libre software engineering, maintainability, reliability, functional diversity, modularity, developers’ motivations, user-innovation, peer-esteem, reputational reward systems, agent-based modeling, stochastic simulation, stigmergy, morphogenesis.

Advancing Economic Research on the Free and Open Source Software Mode of Production

Early contributions to the academic literature on free/libre and open source software (F/LOSS) movements have been directed primarily at identifying the motivations that account for the sustained and often intensive involvement of many people in this non-contractual and unremunerated productive activity. This issue has been particularly prominent in economists’ contributions to the literature, and it reflects a view that widespread voluntary participation in the creation of economically valuable goods that is to be distributed without charge constitutes a significant behavioral anomaly. Undoubtedly, the motivations of F/LOSS developers deserve to be studied more intensively, but not because their behaviors are unique, or historically unprecedented. In this essay we argue that other aspects of the “open source” phenomenon are just as intriguing, if not more so, and possibly are also more consequential topics for economic analysis. We describe the re-focusing and re-direction of empirical and theoretical research in an integrated international project (based at Stanford University/SIEPR) that aims at better understanding a set of less widely discussed topics: the modes of organization, governance and performance of F/LOSS development -- viewed as a collective distributed mode of production.. We discuss of the significance of tackling those questions in order to assess the potentialities of the “open source way of working” as a paradigm for a broader class of knowledge and information- goods production, and conclude with proposals for the trajectory of future research along that line.

Authoritative linked data descriptions of debian source packages using ADMS.SW

Part 1: Full Papers - FOSS TechnologiesInternational audienceThe Debian Package Tracking System is a Web dashboard for Debian contributors and advanced users. This central tool publishes the status of subsequent releases of source packages in the Debiandistribution. It has been improved to generate RDF meta-data documenting the urcepackages, their releases and links to other packaging artifacts, using the ADMS.SW 1.0 model. This constitutes an authoritative source ofmachine-readable Debian "facts" and proposes a reference URI naming scheme for Linked Data resources about Debian packages. This should enable the interlinking of these Debian package descriptions with other ADMS.SW or DOAP descriptions of FLOSS projects available on the Semantic Web also using Linked Data principles. This will be particularly interesting for traceability with upstream projects whose releases are packaged in Debian, derivative istributions reusing Debian source packages, or with other FLOSS distributions