Involving External Stakeholders in Project Courses

Problem: The involvement of external stakeholders in capstone projects and project courses is desirable due to its potential positive effects on the students. Capstone projects particularly profit from the inclusion of an industrial partner to make the project relevant and help students acquire professional skills. In addition, an increasing push towards education that is aligned with industry and incorporates industrial partners can be observed. However, the involvement of external stakeholders in teaching moments can create friction and could, in the worst case, lead to frustration of all involved parties. Contribution: We developed a model that allows analysing the involvement of external stakeholders in university courses both in a retrospective fashion, to gain insights from past course instances, and in a constructive fashion, to plan the involvement of external stakeholders. Key Concepts: The conceptual model and the accompanying guideline guide the teachers in their analysis of stakeholder involvement. The model is comprised of several activities (define, execute, and evaluate the collaboration). The guideline provides questions that the teachers should answer for each of these activities. In the constructive use, the model allows teachers to define an action plan based on an analysis of potential stakeholders and the pedagogical objectives. In the retrospective use, the model allows teachers to identify issues that appeared during the project and their underlying causes. Drawing from ideas of the reflective practitioner, the model contains an emphasis on reflection and interpretation of the observations made by the teacher and other groups involved in the courses. Key Lessons: Applying the model retrospectively to a total of eight courses shows that it is possible to reveal hitherto implicit risks and assumptions and to gain a better insight into the interaction...Comment: Abstract shortened since arxiv.org limits length of abstracts. See paper/pdf for full abstract. Paper is forthcoming, accepted August 2017. Arxiv version 2 corrects misspelled author nam

Forking Without Clicking: on How to Identify Software Repository Forks

International audienceThe notion of software "fork" has been shifting over time from the (negative) phenomenon of community disagreements that result in the creation of separate development lines and ultimately software products, to the (positive) practice of using distributed version control system (VCS) repositories to collaboratively improve a single product without stepping on each others toes. In both cases the VCS repositories participating in a fork share parts of a common development history. Studies of software forks generally rely on hosting platform metadata, such as GitHub, as the source of truth for what constitutes a fork. These "forge forks" however can only identify as forks repositories that have been created on the platform, e.g., by clicking a "fork" button on the platform user interface. The increased diversity in code hosting platforms (e.g., GitLab) and the habits of significant development communities (e.g., the Linux kernel, which is not primarily hosted on any single platform) call into question the reliability of trusting code hosting platforms to identify forks. Doing so might introduce selection and methodological biases in empirical studies. In this article we explore various definitions of "software forks", trying to capture forking workflows that exist in the real world. We quantify the differences in how many repositories would be identified as forks on GitHub according to the various definitions, confirming that a significant number could be overlooked by only considering forge forks. We study the structure and size of fork networks , observing how they are affected by the proposed definitions and discuss the potential impact on empirical research

An exploratory study on strategic software development outsourcing

In today\u27s software industry many business organizations are realizing that Software Development Outsourcing (SDO) is an imperative and strategic step for their system operation success. Many organizations have or are in the process of implementing such business transformation. This study is to investigate the status quo of strategic SDO in the software industry. To conduct this research, a mixed method exploratory study that consists of a survey and multiple cases has been adopted. The research unveils how industrial software organizations capitalize on SDO as a strategic tool in their product development

Towards Sustainable Open Source

Part 4: WorkshopsInternational audienceOpen source software is gaining momentum in several forms. In addition to the huge increase in the number of open source projects started and the remarkable rise of FLOSS adoption by companies and governments, new models of participation in the movement are emerging rapidly. For instance, companies are increasingly releasing some of their proprietary software systems as open source on one hand and acquiring open source software on the other hand. For all these forms of involvement, a central question is how to build and maintain a sustainable ecosystem around the open source projects. Sustainability issues of open source extends beyond the technical challenges of building project infrastructure covering other important aspects related to business, economic, legal, social, and cultural dimensions. Long term sustainability will be the theme of OSS 2012 to be held in Tunisia. We think that the OSS community could start discussing the theme by exchanging related experiences, sharing relevant concerns, and proposing topics of interest

EAM: Ecosystemability Assessment Method

In this extended abstract, we present the ecosystemability assessment method as a means to assess the extent to which a software system, represented by its architecture and its development environment, supports the vision of ecosystem

Investigating Relationships Between FLOSS Foundations and FLOSS Projects

Part 1: Projects, Communication, and ParticipationInternational audienceFoundations function as vital institutional support infrastructures for many of the most successful open source projects, but the role of these support entities remains an understudied phenomenon in FLOSS research. Drawing on Open Hub (formerly known as Ohloh) data, this paper empirically investigates the different ways these entities support projects and interact with different projects and with each other