Collaborative Software Development Process Research Articles

Continuously mining distributed version control systems: an empirical study of how Linux uses Git

Distributed version control systems (D-VCSs --such as git and mercurial) and their hosting services (such as Github and Bitbucket) have revolutionalized the way in which developers collaborate by allowing them to freely exchange and integrate code changes in a peer-to-peer fashion. However, this flexibility comes at a price: code changes are hard to track because of the proliferation of code repositories and because developers modify ("rebase") and filter ("cherry-pick") the history of these changes to streamline their integration into the repositories of other developers. As a consequence, researchers and practitioners, who typically only consider the (cleaned up) history in the official project repository, are unaware of important elements and activities in the collaborative software development process. In this paper, we present a method that continuously mines all known D-VCSs of a software project to uncover the complete development history of a project. We use this method to (1) show the divergence between the code history development in the official Linux kernel repository and the complete kernel development history, and (2) to investigate the characteristics of the ecosystem of git repositories of the Linux kernel. Finally, we discuss how continuous mining could be adopted by current D-VCS hosting services.

A new incomplete preference relations based approach to quality function deployment

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a widely-used methodology for developing a design quality aimed at satisfying the customer and translating the customer’s demand into design targets. As QFD methodology is based on the voices of customers, it requires a group of individuals, or decision makers (DMs), to express their preferences. However, there can be a bottleneck since DMs may not have a perfect knowledge of the problem to be solved. Thereby, the aim of this study is to improve the effectiveness of the evaluation process in QFD. The QFD methodology is extended by introducing a new group decision making (GDM) approach that takes into account incomplete information of DMs by means of the fuzzy set theory. The proposed approach is applied to a collaborative software development process to demonstrate its potential.

Collaborative Software Development Using R-Forge

Open source software (OSS) is typically created in a decentralized self-organizing process by a community of developers having the same or similar interests. A key factor for the success of OSS over the last two decades is the internet: Developers who rarely meet face-to-face can employ new means of communication, both for rapidly writing and deploying software. Therefore, many tools emerged that assist a collaborative software development process, including in particular tools for source code management (SCM) and version control. In the R world, SCM is not a new idea, in fact, the R Development Core Team has always been using SCM tools for the R sources; first by means of Concurrent Versions System (CVS), and then via Subversion (SVN). A central repository is hosted by ETH Zurich mainly for managing the development of the base R system. Mailing lists like R-help, R-devel and many others are currently the main communication channels in the R community. Also beyond the base system, many R contributors employ SCM tools for managing their R packages, e.g., via web-based SVN repositories like SourceForge (http://SourceForge.net/) or Google Code (http://Code.Google.com/). However, there has been no central SCM repository providing services suited to the specific needs of R package developers. Since early 2007, the R-project offers such a central platform to the R community. R-Forge (http://R-Forge.R-project.org/) provides a set of tools for source code management and various web-based features. It aims to provide a platform for collaborative development of R packages, R-related software or further projects.

Managing Problems for Global Software Production – Experience and Lessons

With the increase in size and complexity of current software projects, many large companies have established global software production lines over the world to develop and deliver software products with collaborative software development processes involving multiple teams located at different sites. Supporting global software production needs an effective software-engineering environment to meet the special requirements of the collaborative software development process, diverse management methods and engineering practice. WWW technology provides powerful means to set up an enterprise-oriented software engineering environment for global software production due to its advantages in networking, global access, internationalization, and communication. Although there are many articles addressing the methods and experience in building web-based applications systems and tools, very few papers discuss the real-world problems and solutions in the development and deployment of web-based software tools to support a collaborative software development process for global software production. This paper discusses the real world issues, and reports our experience and lessons in building and deploying a web-based problem information management system (PIMS) to support global software development processes at Fujitsu. It focuses on the real issues and needs of current collaborative development process involving multiple teams, and highlights the benefits and impact of the PIMS on global software production. Moreover, it discusses our technical solutions and trade-offs in the development of PIMS, and shares our experience and lessons. Furthermore, it introduces a new data-centered conceptual process model to support diverse collaborative processes for project and problem management in global software production. Finally, the paper shares our key successes and weaknesses, and reports our experience and lessons in the deployment of the system.