Software Development Community Research Articles

Categorizing the Content of GitHub README Files

README files play an essential role in shaping a developer’s first impression of a software repository and in documenting the software project that the repository hosts. Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of the content of a typical README file as well as tools that can process these files automatically. To close this gap, we conduct a qualitative study involving the manual annotation of 4,226 README file sections from 393 randomly sampled GitHub repositories and we design and evaluate a classifier and a set of features that can categorize these sections automatically. We find that information discussing the ‘What’ and ‘How’ of a repository is very common, while many README files lack information regarding the purpose and status of a repository. Our multi-label classifier which can predict eight different categories achieves an F1 score of 0.746. To evaluate the usefulness of the classification, we used the automatically determined classes to label sections in GitHub README files using badges and showed files with and without these badges to twenty software professionals. The majority of participants perceived the automated labeling of sections based on our classifier to ease information discovery. This work enables the owners of software repositories to improve the quality of their documentation and it has the potential to make it easier for the software development community to discover relevant information in GitHub README files.

Trust in Open Source Software Development Communities

This study presents the significance of trust for the formation of an Open Source Software Development (OSSD) community. OSSD has various challenges that must be overcome for its successful operation. First is the development of a community, which requires a healthy community formation environment. Taking into consideration various factors for community formation, a strong sense of TRUST among its members has been felt. Trust development is a slow process with various methods for building and maintaining it. OSSD is teamwork but the team is of unknowns and volunteers. Trust forms a pillar for effective cooperation, which leads to a reduction in conflicts and risks, associated with quality software development. This study offers an overview of various existing trust models, which aids in the development of a trust evaluation framework for OSSD communities. Towards the end of the study, various components of the trust evaluation along with an empirical framework for the same have been proposed.

BronchoX: bronchoscopy exploration software for biopsy intervention planning.

Virtual bronchoscopy (VB) is a non-invasive exploration tool for intervention planning and navigation of possible pulmonary lesions (PLs). A VB software involves the location of a PL and the calculation of a route, starting from the trachea, to reach it. The selection of a VB software might be a complex process, and there is no consensus in the community of medical software developers in which is the best-suited system to use or framework to choose. The authors present Bronchoscopy Exploration (BronchoX), a VB software to plan biopsy interventions that generate physician-readable instructions to reach the PLs. The authors’ solution is open source, multiplatform, and extensible for future functionalities, designed by their multidisciplinary research and development group. BronchoX is a compound of different algorithms for segmentation, visualisation, and navigation of the respiratory tract. Performed results are a focus on the test the effectiveness of their proposal as an exploration software, also to measure its accuracy as a guiding system to reach PLs. Then, 40 different virtual planning paths were created to guide physicians until distal bronchioles. These results provide a functional software for BronchoX and demonstrate how following simple instructions is possible to reach distal lesions from the trachea.

Organizing for openness: six models for developer involvement in hybrid OSS projects

This article examines organization and governance of commercially influenced Open Source Software development communities by presenting a multiple-case study of six contemporary, hybrid OSS projects. The findings provide in-depth understanding on how to design the participatory nature of the software development process, while understanding the factors that influence the delicate balance of openness, motivations, and governance. The results lay ground for further research on how to organize and manage developer communities where needs of the stakeholders are competing, yet complementary.

Software process models: a review and analysis

Modeling of software process has been a very challenging problem and constantly debated in the software development community in the past 30+ years, largely due to the complex nature of the software development process that involves not only the technical knowledge and skills but also many other factors, such as human, management, quality assessment, and cost. Although the situations of creating software differ greatly from one case to another, there are some common themes shared by many of the situations, and hence various software process models have been emerged to address these common themes. In this paper, we present a review of the software process models commonly used in practice, from traditional to agile, and assessment of these models with metrics and case studies.

Software process models: a review and analysis

Modeling of software process has been a very challenging problem and constantly debated in the software development community in the past 30+ years, largely due to the complex nature of the software development process that involves not only the technical knowledge and skills but also many other factors, such as human, management, quality assessment, and cost. Although the situations of creating software differ greatly from one case to another, there are some common themes shared by many of the situations, and hence various software process models have been emerged to address these common themes. In this paper, we present a review of the software process models commonly used in practice, from traditional to agile, and assessment of these models with metrics and case studies.

A survey on mining stack overflow: question and answering (Q&A) community

PurposeSoftware developers extensively use stack overflow (SO) for knowledge sharing on software development. Thus, software engineering researchers have started mining the structured/unstructured data present in certain software repositories including the Q&A software developer community SO, with the aim to improve software development. The purpose of this paper is show that how academics/practitioners can get benefit from the valuable user-generated content shared on various online social networks, specifically from Q&A community SO for software development.Design/methodology/approachA comprehensive literature review was conducted and 166 research papers on SO were categorized about software development from the inception of SO till June 2016.FindingsMost of the studies revolve around a limited number of software development tasks; approximately 70 percent of the papers used millions of posts data, applied basic machine learning methods, and conducted investigations semi-automatically and quantitative studies. Thus, future research should focus on the overcoming existing identified challenges and gaps.Practical implicationsThe work on SO is classified into two main categories; “SO design and usage” and “SO content applications.” These categories not only give insights to Q&A forum providers about the shortcomings in design and usage of such forums but also provide ways to overcome them in future. It also enables software developers to exploit such forums for the identified under-utilized tasks of software development.Originality/valueThe study is the first of its kind to explore the work on SO about software development and makes an original contribution by presenting a comprehensive review, design/usage shortcomings of Q&A sites, and future research challenges.

Implicit and Explicit Knowledge Mining of Crowdsourced Communities: Architectural and Technology Verdicts

The use of social media especially community Q&A Sites by software development community has been increased significantly in past few years. The ever mounting data on these Q&A Sites has open up new horizons for research in multiple dimensions. Stackoverflow is repository of large amount of data related to software engineering. Software architecture and technology selection verdicts in SE have enormous and ultimate influence on overall properties and performance of software system, and pose risks to change if once implemented. Most of the risks in Software Engineering projects are directly or indirectly coupled with Architectural and Technology decisions (ATD). Advance Architectural knowledge availability and its utilization are crucial for decision making. Existing architecture and technology knowledge management approaches using software repositories give a rich insight to support architects by offering a wide spectrum of architecture and technology verdicts. However, they are mostly insourced and still depend on manual generation and maintenance of the architectural knowledge. This paper compares various software development approaches and suggests crowdsourcing as knowledge ripped approach and brings into use the most popular online software development community/Crowdsourced (StackOverflow) as a rich source of knowledge for technology decisions to support architecture knowledge management with a more reliable method of data mining for knowledge capturing. This is an exploratory study that follows a qualitative and qualitative e-content analysis approach. Our proposed framework finds relationships among technology and architecture related posts in this community to identify architecture-relevant and technology-related knowledge through explicit and implicit knowledge mining, and performs classification and clustering for the purpose of knowledge structuring for future work.

Automatic Transformation of User Stories into UML Use Case Diagrams using NLP Techniques

Agile methods in general and the Scrum method in particular are gaining more and more trust from the software developer community. When it comes to writing a functional requirement, user stories become more and more usable by the community. Furthermore, a considerable effort has already been made by the community in relation to the use of the use case tool when drafting requirements and in terms of model transformation. We have reached a certain stage of maturity at this level. The idea of our paper is to profit from these richness and to invest it in the drafting of user stories. In this paper, we propose a process of transforming user stories into use cases and we will be able to benefit from all the work done in the transformation of the models according to the MDA approach. To do this, we used natural language processing (NLP) techniques, by applying TreeTagger parser. Our work was validated by a case study where we were able to obtain very positive precisions between 87% and 98%.

A Suite of Object Oriented Cognitive Complexity Metrics

Object orientation has gained a wide adoption in the software development community. To this end, different metrics that can be utilized in measuring and improving the quality of object-oriented (OO) software have been proposed, by providing insight into the maintainability and reliability of the system. Some of these software metrics are based on cognitive weight and are referred to as cognitive complexity metrics. It is our objective in this paper to present a suite of cognitive complexity metrics that can be used to evaluate OO software projects. The present suite of metrics includes method complexity, message complexity, attribute complexity, weighted class complexity, and code complexity. The metrics suite was evaluated theoretically using measurement theory and Weyuker’s properties, practically using Kaner’s framework and empirically using thirty projects.

Our GIS is too small

GIScience and GISystems have been successful in tackling many geographical problems over the last 30 years. But technologies and associated theory can become limiting if they end up defining how we see the world and what we believe are worthy and tractable research problems. This paper explores some of the limitations currently impacting GISystems and GIScience from the perspective of technology and community, contrasting GIScience with other informatics communities and their practices. It explores several themes: (i) GIScience and the informatics revolution; (ii) the lack of a community‐owned innovation platform for GIScience research; (iii) the computational limitations imposed by desktop computing and the inability to scale up analysis; (iv) the continued failure to support the temporal dimension, and especially dynamic processes and models with feedbacks; (v) the challenge of embracing a wider and more heterogeneous view of geographical representation and analysis; and (vi) the urgent need to foster an active software development community to redress some of these shortcomings. A brief discussion then summarizes the issues and suggests that GIScience needs to work harder as a community to become more relevant to the broader geographic field and meet a bigger set of representation, analysis, and modelling needs.

Networked innovation and coalition formation: the effect of group-based social preferences

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we study the production and dissemination of public knowledge goods, such as technological knowledge, generated by a network of voluntarily cooperating innovators. We develop a private-collective model of public knowledge production in networked innovation systems, where group-based social preferences have an impact on the coalition formation of developers. Our model builds on the large empirical literature on voluntary production of pooled public knowledge goods, including source code in communities of software developers or data provided to open access data repositories. Our analysis shows under which conditions social preferences, such as ‘group belonging’ or ‘peer approval’, influence the stable coalition size, as such rationalising several stylized facts emerging from large-scale surveys of open-source software developers, previously unaccounted for. Furthermore, heterogeneity of social preferences is added to the model to study the formation of stable but mixed coalitions.

Rhetorical Genres in Code

We examine the rhetorical activity employed within software development communities in code texts. For technical communicators, the rhetoricity of code is crucial for the development of more effective code and documentation. When we understand that code is a collection of rhetorical decisions about how to engage those machinic processes, we can better attend to the significance and nuance of those decisions and their impact on potential user activities.

How the R community creates and curates knowledge: an extended study of stack overflow and mailing lists

One of the effects of social media’s prevalence in software development is the many flourishing communities of practice where users share a common interest. These large communities use many different communication channels, but little is known about how they create, share, and curate knowledge using such channels. In this paper, we report a mixed methods study of how one community of practice, the R software development community, creates and curates knowledge associated with questions and answers (QA the reasons why users choose one channel over the other; and insights on the community participation patterns, which indicate an evolution of the community and a shift from knowledge creation to knowledge curation.

Information Systems Quality and Success in Canadian Software Development Firms

For years, firms have been investing millions of dollars in information systems (IS) to gain operational and strategic benefits. However, in most cases these expected benefits have not been realized because the software development community has been plagued with the delivery of low quality and unsuccessful information systems. Duggan and Reichgelt's information systems quality model was adapted with minor modifications to explore the impact of process maturity and people on IS quality in Canadian software development firms. The study also investigated the impact of IS quality on IS success. Using PLS-Graph as the statistical tool, it was discovered that people skills and contribution had the greatest impact on IS quality and that IS quality impacted IS success. These findings are important to both IS practitioners and researchers in their desire to deliver high quality and successful information systems in Canada.

Collaboration in OSS Communities: Who Solves Whose Problems?

In open collaboration, an economically important form of organizing technology development in online communities, both producers and users, either firm or independent users, invest their resources to develop and share technological problems as well as solutions freely accessible to the public. Existing literature draws ambivalent conclusions about whether and how the different actors engage in joint problem solving. Given potential conflicts of interest and variance in problem types, in terms of who shares the problem and how much generative efforts a problem demands, we know little about the role and nature of joint problem solving in open collaboration. Taking a dynamic view towards knowledge collaboration, this paper uses granular data about problem solving in OpenStack, a large and successful open source software development community, to examine joint problem solving in open collaboration. We show that not all problem types channel participation in the same way. Both producers and users prefer firm user problems. Secondarily, they also focus more on generative problems unless they are independent users. Our findings contribute to the theoretical puzzle about whether and when open collaboration is actually about “collaboration” and informs managers about opportunities for greater joint problem solving.

Special issue on software reuse

Special issue on software reuse

SOFTWARE PROCESS IMPROVEMENT: AWARENESS, USE, AND BENEFITS IN CANADIAN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FIRMS

ABSTRACT Since 1982, the software development community has been concerned with the delivery of quality systems. Software process improvement (SPI) is an initiative to avoid the delivery of low quality systems. However, the awareness and adoption of SPI is low. Thus, this study examines the rate of awareness, use, and benefits of SPI initiatives in Canadian software development firms. Using SPSS as the analytical tool, this study found that 59% of Canadian software development firms are aware of SPI programs and 43% of employees use a form of SPI programs to develop software products. Although the sample size is small and the results cannot be generalized, the sample firms that use SPI programs reported an improvement in software product quality as the greatest benefit. These findings confirm the importance of SPI programs as a means of producing higher-quality software products, which can increase the likelihood of software companies winning global contracts.

Challenges & Opportunities Concerning Corporate Formation, Nonprofit Status, & Governance for Open Source Projects

This report addresses a number of key considerations that those managing open source software development initiatives should take into account when thinking about structure, organization, and governance. The genesis of this project involved an investigation into anecdotal reports that companies and other institutions developing open source software were facing difficulties obtaining tax exempt nonprofit status under Section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. Based on conversations with a number of constituents in the open source software development community, the authors have prepared this report to address specific questions about nonprofit status alongside questions about corporate formation and governance models more generally. Nothing in this report should be viewed as a substitute for specific legal advice on the narrow questions facing particular organizations under particular sets of factual circumstances. But, the authors are hopeful the document provides a general overview of the complex issues that open source initiatives face when balancing a need for structure and continuity with the innovative and experimental spirit at the heart of many open source development projects. The report has two primary parts: • First, it addresses some formal organizational considerations that open source software initiatives should weigh, evaluating the benefits of taking on a formal structure and the options for doing so. The report provides information about different types of corporate organization that open source projects may wish to consider. And, it delves into Internal Revenue Service policy and practice and US tax law concerning questions about the tax exemptions referenced above. • In its second half, the authors pull back to consider more broadly questions of organizational structure, offering ideas about governance models that open source organizations may wish to explore, separate from formal corporate structure, as they seek to achieve their missions. Different considerations may inform the choice of formal, legal organizational structures (on the one hand) and governance models (on the other hand). By addressing both, the authors hope that this report will be useful to the broadest possible range of managers of and contributors to open source development initiatives.

IDENTIFICATION AND QUANTIFICATION OF FACTORS AFFECTING REUSABILITY OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN REUSE-INTENSIVE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Open Source Software (OSS) is one of the emerging areas in software engineering. Reuse of OSS is employed in reuse-intensive software development such as Component Based Software Development and Software Product Lines. OSS is gaining the interest of the software development community due to its enormous benefits. The context of this study is the identification and quantification of factors affecting reusability of OSS in reuse-intensive software development. The use of OSS in the systematic reuse of software, such as in Software Product Lines (SPLs) is a new phenomenon. Therefore, the aim of this study is to identify and quantify the factors affecting the reusability of OSS in reuse-intensive software development, especially for SPLs. In this study, a mixed methods based approach is employed to identify the factors affecting the reusability of OSS. Interviews are conducted with experts in this field as the qualitative part, followed by a survey, experiments and a statistical analysis. The factors identified during the interviews are ranked by software engineers in a survey. Experiment is conducted to assess the reusability of open source packages. The factors are validated by conducting a statistical analysis of the results of the experiments. A set of nine factors were identified as a result of the qualitative study. A model was formed on the basis of the findings of interviews and a survey. It includes five factors. These were statistically analyzed by applying the model to 77 open source packages. A set of nine factors were identified as affecting reusability of OSS in a reuse-intensive development environment. Five of them were validated at the code level. The statistical results show a positive correlation between reusability and the identified factors. Keywords: Open source software; software reusability; mixed method