Towards Mining Norms in Open Source Software Repositories

Abstract

AbstractExtracting norms from computer-mediated human interactions is gaining popularity since huge volume of data is available from which norms can be extracted. Open source communities offer exciting new application opportunities for extracting norms since such communities involve developers from different geographical regions, background and cultures. Investigating the types of norms that exist in open source projects and their efficacy (i.e. the usage of norms) in enabling smoother functioning however has not received much attention from the normative multi-agent systems (NorMAS) community. This paper makes two contributions in this regard. First, it presents norm compliance results from a case study involving three open source Java projects. Second, it presents an architecture for mining norms from open source projects. It also discusses the opportunities presented by the domain of software repositories for the study of norms. In particular, it points towards how norms can be mined by leveraging and extending prior work in the areas of Normative Multi-Agent Systems (NorMAS) and mining software repositories.KeywordsNormative Multi-agent Systems (NorMAS)Mining Software Repositories (MSR)Open Source Software Development (OSSD)Violence DatabaseProject Management CommitteeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.