Comprehensive assessment of open source software ecosystem health

Open source software ecosystems: A Systematic mapping

For a firm in an open source software (OSS) ecosystem, the requirements engineering (RE) process is rather multifaceted. Apart from its typical RE process, there is a competing process, external to the firm and inherent to the firm’s ecosystem. When trying to impose an agenda in competition with other firms, and aiming to align internal product planning with the ecosystem’s RE process, firms need to consider who and how influential the other stakeholders are, and what their agendas are. The aim of the presented research is to help firms identify and analyze stakeholders in OSS ecosystems, in terms of their influence and interactions, to create awareness of their agendas, their collaborators, and how they invest their resources. To arrive at a solution artifact, we applied a design science research approach where we base artifact design on the literature and earlier work. A stakeholder influence analysis (SIA) method is proposed and demonstrated in terms of applicability and utility through a case study on the Apache Hadoop OSS ecosystem. SIA uses social network constructs to measure the stakeholders’ influence and interactions and considers the special characteristics of OSS RE to help firms structure their stakeholder analysis processes in relation to an OSS ecosystem. SIA adds a strategic aspect to the stakeholder analysis process by addressing the concepts of influence and interactions, which are important to consider while acting in collaborative and meritocratic RE cultures of OSS ecosystems.

Context and motivation: Contribution Management helps firms engaged in Open Source Software (OSS) ecosystems to motivate what they should contribute and when, but also what they should focus their resources on and to what extent. Such guidelines are also referred to as contribution strategies. The motivation for developing tailored contribution strategies is to maximize return on investment and sustain the influence needed in the ecosystem. Question/Problem: We aim to develop a framework to help firms understand their current situation and create a starting point to develop an effective contribution management process. Principal ideas/results: Through a design science approach, a prototype framework is created based on literature and validated iteratively with expert opinions through interviews. Contribution: In this research preview, we present our initial results after our first design cycle and consultation with one experienced OSS manager at a large OSS oriented software-intensive firm. The initial validation highlights importance of stakeholder identification and analysis, as well as the general need for contribution management and alignment with internal product planning. This encourages future work to develop the framework further using expert and case validation.

Open Source Software (OSS) ecosystems have reshaped the ways how software-intensive firms develop products and deliver value to customers. However, firms still need support for strategic product planning in terms of what to develop internally and what to share as OSS. Existing models accurately capture commoditization in software business, but lack operational support to decide what contribution strategy to employ in terms of what and when to contribute. This study proposes a Contribution Acceptance Process (CAP) model from which firms can adopt contribution strategies that align with product strategies and planning. In a design science influenced case study executed at Sony Mobile, the CAP model was iteratively developed in close collaboration with the firm’s practitioners. The CAP model helps classify artifacts according to business impact and control complexity so firms may estimate and plan whether an artifact should be contributed or not. Further, an information meta-model is proposed that helps operationalize the CAP model at the organization. The CAP model provides an operational OI perspective on what firms involved in OSS ecosystems should share, by helping them motivate contributions through the creation of contribution strategies. The goal is to help maximize return on investment and sustain needed influence in OSS ecosystems.

Background: Open source software (OSS) and software ecosystems (SECOs) are two consolidated research areas in software engineering. The adoption of OSS by firms, governments, researchers and practitioners has been increasing rapidly in the last decades, and in consequence, they find themselves in a new kind of ecosystem composed by software communities,foundations, developers and partners, namely Open Source Software Ecosystem (OSSECO). In order to perform a systematic\n\t\t\t\t quality evaluation of a SECO, it is necessary to define certain types of concrete elements. This means that measures and evaluations should be described (e.g., through thresholds or expert judgment). The quality evaluation of an OSSECO may serve several purposes, for example: adopters of the products of the OSSECO may want to know about the liveliness of the OSSECO (e.g., recent updates); software developers may want to know about the activeness (e.g., how many collaborators are involved and how active they are); and the OSSECO community itself to know about the OSSECO health (e.g., evolving in the right direction). However, the current approaches for evaluating software quality (even those specific for open source software) do not cover all the aspects relevant in an OSSECO from an ecosystem perspective.\n\t\t\t\t Goal: The main goal of this PhD thesis is to support the OSSECO quality evaluation by designing a framework that supports the\n\t\t\t\t quality evaluation of OSSECOs.\n\t\t\t\t Methods: To accomplish this goal, we have used and approach based on design science methodology by Wieringa [1] and the\n\t\t\t\t characterization of software engineering proposed by M. Shaw [2], in order to produce a set of artefacts to contribute in thequality evaluation of OSSECOs and to learn about the effects of using these artefacts in practice.\n\t\t\t\t Results: We have conducted a systematic mapping to characterize OSSECOs and designed the QuESo framework (a framework to evaluate the OSSECO quality) composed by three artifacts: (i) QuESo-model, a quality model for OSSECOs; (ii) QuESoprocess, a process for conducting OSSECO quality evaluations using the QuESo-model; and (iii) QuESo-tool, a software component to support semi-automatic quality evaluation of OSSECOs. Furthermore, this framework has been validated with a case study on Eclipse.\n\t\t\t\t Conclusions: This thesis has contributed to increase the knowledge and understanding of OSSECOs, and to support the qualityevaluation of OSSECOs.\n\n\t\t\t\t [

METHODS: A meta-path-based method for heterogeneous community detection in the open source software ecosystem

Open source software (OSS) is a collaborative effort. Getting affordable high-quality software with less probability of errors or fails is not far away. Thousands of open-source projects (termed repos) are alternatives to proprietary software development. More than two-thirds of companies are contributing to open source. Open source technologies like OpenStack, Docker and KVM are being used to build the next generation of digital infrastructure. An iconic example of OSS is 'GitHub' - a successful social site. GitHub is a hosting platform that host repositories (repos) based on the Git version control system. GitHub is a knowledge-based workspace. It has several features that facilitate user communication and work integration. Through this thesis I employ data extracted from GitHub, and seek to better understand the OSS ecosystem, and to what extent each of its deployed elements affects the successful development of the OSS ecosystem. In addition, I investigate a repo's growth over different time periods to test the changing behavior of the repo. From our observations developers do not follow one development methodology when developing, and growing their project, and such developers tend to cherry-pick from differing available software methodologies. GitHub API remains the main OSS location engaged to extract the metadata for this thesis's research. This extraction process is time-consuming - due to restrictive access limitations (even with authentication). I apply Structure Equation Modelling (termed SEM) to investigate the relative path relationships between the GitHub- deployed OSS elements, and I determine the path strength contributions of each element to determine the OSS repo's activity level. SEM is a multivariate statistical analysis technique used to analyze structural relationships. This technique is the combination of factor analysis and multiple regression analysis. It is used to analyze the structural relationship between measured variables and/or latent constructs. This thesis bridges the research gap around longitude OSS studies. It engages large sample-size OSS repo metadata sets, data-quality control, and multiple programming language comparisons. Querying GitHub is not direct (nor simple) yet querying for all valid repos remains important - as sometimes illegal, or unrepresentative outlier repos (which may even be quite popular) do arise, and these then need to be removed from each initial OSS's language-specific metadata set. Eight top GitHub programming languages, (selected as the most forked repos) are separately engaged in this thesis's research. This thesis observes these eight metadata sets of GitHub repos. Over time, it measures the different repo contributions of the deployed elements of each metadata set. The number of stars-provided to the repo delivers a weaker contribution to its software development processes. Sometimes forks work against the repo's progress by generating very minor negative total effects into its commit (activity) level, and by sometimes diluting the focus of the repo's software development strategies. Here, a fork may generate new ideas, create a new repo, and then draw some original repo developers off into this new software development direction, thus retarding the original repo's commit (activity) level progression. Multiple intermittent and minor version releases exert lesser GitHub JavaScript repo commit (or activity) changes because they often involve only slight OSS improvements, and because they only require minimal commit/commits contributions. More commit(s) also bring more changes to documentation, and again the GitHub OSS repo's commit (activity) level rises. There are both direct and indirect drivers of the repo's OSS activity. Pulls and commits are the strongest drivers. This suggests creating higher levels of pull requests is likely a preferred prime target consideration for the repo creator's core team of developers. This study offers a big data direction for future work. It allows for the deployment of more sophisticated statistical comparison techniques. It offers further indications around the internal and broad relationships that likely exist between GitHub's OSS big data. Its data extraction ideas suggest a link through to business/consumer consumption, and possibly how these may be connected using improved repo search algorithms that release individual business value components.

Over time many software ecosystems have achieved success. Several organizations are opening their software projects for external businesses, creating an multi-organizational government to development their software platform The software architecture has an important participation in this success. In this context, there are some studies describing architectural challenges for software ecosystems, but little research is investigating how these challenges are being faced by software ecosystems organizations. This paper presents an initial investigation how open source software (OSS) ecosystems have faced several architectural challenges. We conducted interviews with three architects of different OSS ecosystems and gathered some architectural practices to lead with challenges. We also analyzed how these architectural practices have influenced the software ecosystem health, introducing the concept of Software Ecosystems Architectural Health.

Collaboration in software ecosystems: A study of work groups in open environment

With the development of open-source technology, open-source software ecosystems (OSSECO) have been formed due to various connections between open-source projects and developers. To measure stability and sustainability, the health of an OSSECO is proposed, like the health of ecosystems in nature. Unfortunately, there are not a set of unified and mature OSSECO health evaluation rules yet, nor have effective governance methods. Existing researches mainly analyze the health of a specific open-source ecosystem or design performance indicators related to OSSECO health. This paper combines the classic OSEHO model with the rapidly developing CHAOSS open-source community metrics, establishes an OSSECO health evaluation model that can provide specific scores based on Entropy Method, and develops an open-source ecosystem health evaluation system based on the model. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a qualitative and quantitative model to show the health status of open-source ecosystems. Meanwhile, we conduct the automatic evaluation of the health of an OSSECO. Finally, we analyze the software ecosystem health of 10 open-source projects on GitHub by the established evaluation system. The result can prove the effectiveness of the system and provide data support for developers to make governance decisions.

In Open Source Software (OSS) development community supported by spontaneous volunteers, technical capabilities, hunger for fame and the satisfaction of contribution are said to be motivating factor for participation. In that community, vendors always play auxiliary roles, and integrate the result of OSS into their business activities. However, in the Eclipse OSS community, the main role of OSS development activities is taken over by vendors. The relationship between individuals and vendors is reversed. Therefore, it becomes important to maintain the motivation of the development community, promote innovation and link the activities to the profit of vendors. In other words, management of co-creation and competition are being conducted at the same time. This paper tries to clarify internal and external structures in an OSS ecosystem led by vendors considering the Eclipse community as one particular case. Also it constructs a co-creation model to promote sustainable development for an OSS ecosystem.

The development of an Open Source Software (OSS) can influence the development of other Open Source Systems. The relationship between OSS is often called an ecosystem, there are several aspects to the OSS ecosystem that can affect ecosystem evolution in the software. This study reports a systematic literature review on the influence of several aspects of the OSS ecosystem on the evolution of OSS. The Sistematic Literature Review method based on Kitchenham was used to analyze 1099 articles published in leading journals and conferences. The Results showed that Social aspects have a significant impact on ecosystem evolution, where communication between communities in an OSS ecosystem influences aspects of contributions and dependencies that encourage an ecosystem to develop and evolve.

Increasingly complicated software makes it difficult to attract or maintain open source software (OSS) contributors. Faced with such challenges of increasingly complicated software design, large-scale refactoring that radically restructures the architecture of the software can be one of the solutions. In this study, we investigate and illustrate how OSS contributors accomplish large-scale refactoring in OSS development in which there is no significant corporate participation. In our observations, as the costs of coordination requirements rise, OSS contributors increase coordination capability to manage dependencies among multiple sources during the large-scale refactoring periods. Our findings suggest that OSS contributors episodically use traditional coordination mechanisms during the large-scale refactoring periods. Our study provides actionable insights into how OSS contributors make joint action that cannot be achieved by individuals working independently and use the provision of rewards in order to achieve a shared, explicit goal of large-scale refactoring.

The steady rise of open source software (OSS) (Raymond, 1999) over the last few decades has made a noticeable impact on many sectors of society where software has a role to play. As reflected from the frequency of media articles, traffic on mailing lists, and growing research literature, OSS has garnered much support in the software community. Indeed, from the early days of GNU software, to X Window System, to Linux and its utilities, and more recently the Apache Software Project, OSS has changed the way software is developed and used. As the deployment of OSS increases, the issue of its quality with respect to its stakeholders arises. We contend that the open source community collectively bears responsibility of producing “high-quality” OSS. Lack of quality raises various risks for organizations adopting OSS (Golden, 2004). This article discusses the manifestation of quality in open source software development (OSSD) from a traditional software engineering standpoint. The organization is as follows. We first outline the background and related work necessary for the discussion that follows, and state our position. This is followed by a detailed treatment of key software engineering practices that directly or indirectly impact the quality of OSS. Next, challenges and directions for future research are outlined and, finally, concluding remarks are given.

Context: Relationships within open-source software ecosystems (OSSECO) emerge from collaborations within an ecosystem. Power relations are present in this context whenever an entity has the power of making other entities act as it wants them to act. Therefore, these power relations could affect collaboration within an OSSECO. Objective: This research aims at investigating power relations and providing an understanding of them in OSSECO. A conceptual model will be refined and will represent the power relations and their dynamics. Method: A systematic mapping study was conducted to gather knowledge about power relations from previous studies, and a survey research, considering this knowledge, was conducted with randomly selected npm OSSECO community members to evaluate that knowledge. Next, interviews with selected ecosystem community members will be conducted to identify the types of power relations and their dynamics within an OSSECO. Based on the results from the previous phases, a conceptual model to represent power relations and their dynamics in OSSECO will be refined. Results: The literature review and the survey research with the npm OSSECO community show that, as expected, power relations are present and affect relationships and interactions within an OSSECO. Hierarchy and financial rewards seem to be related to the power relations within the OSSECO. Implications: Identifying power relations that might be present within an OSSECO would enable those who study or are members of the ecosystem's community to understand previous movements and predict future decisions based on the power relations present in their OSSECO.