A QUALITATIVE EVALUATION OF A CROSS-BORDER IDENTITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM TO SUPPORT PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: INSIGHTS AND LESSONS LEARNED

This paper reports on the research experience gained by carrying out an evaluation for a cross-border identity management system to support e-procurement. This evaluation, which took place in the context of an international research project in the European Union, brought together multiple players. The nature and diversity of the stakeholder involved, and the complexity of the systems under evaluation (in particular their social rather than technical complexity) called for a qualitative evaluation approach. Our investigation provided some interesting insights. On the one hand, these concern the challenges of working in an international project team in the context of a research project. The scope of the project, which essentially aimed at supporting public administrations in diverse national contexts in Europe, adds to complexity as the involvement of public bodies in the trials brings to the fore the political agendas of different parties and member states. On the other hand, equally interesting are the opportunities, the benefits and impediments for cross-border digital identity management across European countries as perceived by the stakeholders involved. These findings have, of course, practical implications for the success of the implementation of e-government systems but also implications for the research agenda in e-government

Measuring Developer Contribution From Software Repository Data

Our work is concerned with an enriched perspective of what constitutes developer contribution in software infrastructures supporting incremental development and distributed software projects. We use the term “contribution” to express the combination of all the actions a developer has performed during the development process and propose a model for calculating this individually for developers participating in a software project. Our approach departs from the traditional practice of only measuring the contribution to the final outcome (the code) and puts emphasis additionally on other activities that do not directly affect the product itself but are essential to the development process.We use the Open Source Software (OSS) context to take advantage of the public availability of data in software repositories. In this paper, we present our method of calculation and its system implementation and we apply our measurements on various projects from the gnome ecosystem

Towards a Theory of Software Development Expertise

Software development includes diverse tasks such as implementing new features, analyzing requirements, and fixing bugs. Being an expert in those tasks requires a certain set of skills, knowledge, and experience. Several studies investigated individual aspects of software development expertise, but what is missing is a comprehensive theory. We present a first conceptual theory of software development expertise that is grounded in data from a mixed-methods survey with 335 software developers and in literature on expertise and expert performance. Our theory currently focuses on programming, but already provides valuable insights for researchers, developers, and employers. The theory describes important properties of software development expertise and which factors foster or hinder its formation, including how developers' performance may decline over time. Moreover, our quantitative results show that developers' expertise self-assessments are context-dependent and that experience is not necessarily related to expertise.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2018), ACM, 201

Beyond Textual Issues: Understanding the Usage and Impact of GitHub Reactions

Recently, GitHub introduced a new social feature, named reactions, which are "pictorial characters" similar to emoji symbols widely used nowadays in text-based communications. Particularly, GitHub users can use a pre-defined set of such symbols to react to issues and pull requests. However, little is known about the real usage and impact of GitHub reactions. In this paper, we analyze the reactions provided by developers to more than 2.5 million issues and 9.7 million issue comments, in order to answer an extensive list of nine research questions about the usage and adoption of reactions. We show that reactions are being increasingly used by open source developers. Moreover, we also found that issues with reactions usually take more time to be handled and have longer discussions.Comment: 10 page

Action-based recommendation in pull-request development

Pull requests (PRs) selection is a challenging task faced by integrators in pull-based development (PbD), with hundreds of PRs submitted on a daily basis to large open-source projects. Managing these PRs manually consumes integrators' time and resources and may lead to delays in the acceptance, response, or rejection of PRs that can propose bug fixes or feature enhancements. On the one hand, well-known platforms for performing PbD, like GitHub, do not provide built-in recommendation mechanisms for facilitating the management of PRs. On the other hand, prior research on PRs recommendation has focused on the likelihood of either a PR being accepted or receive a response by the integrator. In this paper, we consider both those likelihoods, this to help integrators in the PRs selection process by suggesting to them the appropriate actions to undertake on each specific PR. To this aim, we propose an approach, called CARTESIAN (aCceptance And Response classificaTion-based requESt IdentificAtioN) modeling the PRs recommendation according to PR actions. In particular, CARTESIAN is able to recommend three types of PR actions: accept, respond, and reject. We evaluated CARTESIAN on the PRs of 19 popular GitHub projects. The results of our study demonstrate that our approach can identify PR actions with an average precision and recall of about 86%. Moreover, our findings also highlight that CARTESIAN outperforms the results of two baseline approaches in the task of PRs selection

Certification of open source software - A scoping review

Open source software (OSS) systems are being used for increasingly critical functions in modern societies, e.g., in health care, finance, government, defense, and other safety and security sensitive sectors. There is an increasing interest in software certification as a means to assure quality and dependability of such systems. However, the development processes and organizational structures of OSS projects can be substantially different from traditional closed-source projects. The distributed, “bazaar-style” approach to software development in OSS systems is often perceived incompatible with certification. This paper presents the results of a scoping review on certification in OSS systems in order to identify and categorize key issues and provide a comprehensive overview of the current evidence on this topic

Identity management architectures: Arguing for a socio-technical perspective

The spread of advanced information technologies introduced a broader conception of identity, which now includes the representation of people in the virtual environment. As a result, today we can see that identity can be defined both in technology and sociology-oriented terms. Different organisations assign identities to the individuals they interact with and manage them by means of technical solutions that are applicable. In this paper we present the different approaches to a person’s identity: one offered by technology and the requirements of identity providers and one that stems from the concerns of individuals concerning their identity. We argue that the distance between the two approaches must be bridged in order for a more unified concept of identity to be incorporated in all related activities