Introducing automated regression testing in Open Source projects

To learn how to introduce automated regression testing to existing medium scale Open Source projects, a long-term field experiment was performed with the Open Source project FreeCol. Results indicate that (1) introducing testing is both beneficial for the project and feasible for an outside innovator, (2) testing can enhance communication between developers, (3) signaling is important for engaging the project participants to fill a newly vacant position left by a withdrawal of the innovator. Five prescriptive strategies are extracted for the innovator and two conjectures offered about the ability of an Open Source project to learn about innovations

a case study

Globally distributed teams of volunteers and communication by electronic means are at the core of Open Source Software development. To help projects in managing their information, we defined a light-weight, role-based process improvement and observed its use in a longitudinal case study. Results gathered by mailing-list analysis give insights into the different types of information managed and their relative importance: While technical content such as how-tos and to-dos is most frequent, the amount of information regarding decision making is surprisingly low

Empiricism in Computer Science Eike Send

As the name computer science already implies, the study of computers is a field of science. Computer Science (CS) as it exists today lacks to a certain extent, what other sciences rely most on: An empirical body of knowledge. This paper looks at several meta studies which have analyzed the presence of empirical data on CS subjects. It also provides an overview of empiricism in general, some empirical concepts and where computer science and empiricis