Developers In Open Source Projects Research Articles

Trust and involvement of Cameroonian software developers in open-source projects

Trust and involvement of Cameroonian software developers in open-source projects

What Software Architecture Styles are Popular?

One can meet the software architecture style's notion in the software engineering literature. This notion is considered important in books on software architecture and university sources. However, many software developers are not so optimistic about it. It is not clear, whether this notion is just an academic concept, or is actually used in the software industry. In this paper, we measured industrial software developers' attitudes towards the concept of software architecture style. We also investigated the popularity of eleven concrete architecture styles. We applied two methods. A developers’ survey was applied to estimate developers' overall attitude and define what the community thinks about the automatic recognition of software architecture styles. Automatic crawlers were applied to mine the open-source code from the GitHub platform. These crawlers identified style smells in repositories using the features we proposed for the architecture styles. We found that the notion of software architecture style is not just a concept of academics in universities. Many software developers apply this concept in their work. We formulated features for the eleven concrete software architecture styles and developed crawlers based on these features. The results of repository mining using the features showed which styles are popular among developers of open-source projects from commercial companies and non-commercial communities. Automatic mining results were additionally validated by the Github developers survey.

Personal Data Portability In The Platform Economy: Economic Implications And Policy Recommendations

Abstract Article 20 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gave consumers in the European Union the right to port their personal data between digital service providers. We critically assess the economic implications of this new right in the light of the extant economic literature and with a focus on competition and innovation in the digital platform economy. In particular, we conclude that observed user behaviour data should clearly fall under the scope of data portability and that, above and beyond the regulations set out under GDPR, a right to port personal data continuously and in real-time would be necessary to truly empower consumers in the context of the digital platform economy. We also discuss the economics of Personal Information Management Systems (PIMSs), which many policymakers see as an essential tool for consumers in an economy where data portability becomes more widespread. However, we are sceptical that PIMS will be self-sustainable and instead advocate to facilitate the development of open-source projects, which have made little progress so far due to a lack of interfaces (which would come about with a right to continuous data portability) and due to a lack of common standards.

Algorithms for estimating truck factors: a comparative study

Software development is a knowledge-intensive industry. For this reason, concentration of knowledge in software projects tends to be very risky, which increases the relevance of strategies that reveal how source code knowledge is distributed among team members. The truck factor (also known as the bus factor) is an increasingly popular concept—proposed by practitioners—that indicates the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or leave the team) before a project is incapacitated. Therefore, it is a measure that reveals the concentration of knowledge and the key developers in a project. Due to the importance of this concept, algorithms have been proposed to automatically compute truck factors, using maintenance activity data extracted from version control systems. However, we still lack large studies that assess the results of truck factor algorithms. To fulfill this gap in the literature, this paper describes the results of three empirical studies. In the first study, we validate the results produced by three algorithms to estimate truck factors. To this purpose, we build an oracle of truck factors, gathered via a survey with 35 open-source project teams. In the second study, we provide a comparison between truck factors and core developers, a related concept commonly used to denote the key developers of open-source projects. Our results indicate that truck factor developers are in most cases a subset of core developers. Finally, as the algorithms proposed so far are based in commit data, in the third study, we investigate other factors that may impact the computation of truck factors.

Core-reviewer recommendation based on Pull Request topic model and collaborator social network

Pull Request (PR) is a major contributor to external developers of open-source projects in GitHub. PR reviewing is an important part of open-source software developments to ensure the quality of project. Recommending suitable candidates of reviewer to the new PRs will make the PR reviewing more efficient. However, there is not a mechanism of automatic reviewer recommendation for PR in GitHub. In this paper, we propose an automatic core-reviewer recommendation approach, which combines PR topic model with collaborators in the social network. First PR topics will be extracted from PRs by the latent Dirichlet allocation, and then the collaborator–PR network will be constructed with the connection between collaborators and PRs, and the influence of each collaborator will be calculated via the improved PageRank algorithm which combines with HITS. Finally, the relationship between topics and collaborators will also be built by the history of PR reviewing. When a new PR presents, a collaborator will be chosen as a core reviewer according to the influence of collaborators and the relationship between the new PR and collaborators. The experiment results show in the matching score calculation processing, the influence of collaborators shows higher than that with the expert, and the recommendation precision is better than 70%.

The appropriation of GitHub for curation

GitHub is a widely used online collaborative software development environment. In this paper, we describe curation projects as a new category of GitHub project that collects, evaluates, and preserves resources for software developers. We investigate: (1) what motivates software developers to curate resources; (2) why curation has occurred on GitHub; (3) how curated resources are used by software developers; and (4) how the GitHub platform could better support these practices. We conduct in-depth interviews with 16 software developers, each of whom hosts curation projects on GitHub. Our results suggest that the motivators that inspire software developers to curate resources on GitHub are similar to those that motivate them to participate in the development of open source projects. Convenient tools (e.g., Markdown syntax and Git version control system) and the opportunity to address professional needs of a large number of peers attract developers to engage in curation projects on GitHub. Benefits of curating on GitHub include learning opportunities, support for development work, and professional interaction. However, curation is limited by GitHub’s document structure, format, and a lack of key features, such as search. In light of this, we propose design possibilities to encourage and improve appropriations of GitHub for curation.

Open Source Developer Layer Assessment

Open Source developers play fundamental determinant role in the life of any open source project. This paper investigates developer motivation in contributing tirelessly to an open source project. Open source Onions were investigated and the developer layer modeled and validated based on ten case studies from SourceForge. Validation was based on Delphi's four rounds of successive stages. Results show that 62% of the developers around an open source development project community are skilled programmers, and that Open source developers are largely motivated by web based development platforms with universal programming language such as Java and that Developers are mostly attracted to the GPL licensed software development project with high project publicity as could be tracked from the hit rate on the project website. Finally, the few Core developers (Project Administrators) of about 19% actually controls and oversees the affairs carried out by about 81% of many developers showing the prominence of Pareto80/20 Principle in Open Source Project development.

A multivariate classification of open source developers

Open source software development is becoming always more relevant. Understanding the behavior of developers in open source software projects and identifying the kinds of their contributions is an essential step to improve the efficiency of the development process and to organize the development teams more effectively. Moreover, understanding the level of participation of the different developers helps to understand which members of the development team are more important than others and who are the actual key developers. This paper investigates the behavior of open source developers and the structure of the development of open source projects through the analysis of a very large dataset: 10 well-known and widely used open source software projects for a total of more than 4 MLOC (millions of lines of code) modified distributed in more than 200K versions. This study builds on the top of other studies in this area applying a set of rigorous statistical techniques, analyzing how developers contribute to the projects. Its novelty is in the fine gain analysis of the developers that have commit rights on the repository of the project they work on, in the automated identification of key contributors of the project, in the size of the analyzed datasets, and in the statistical techniques used to classify the behavior of the developers in an automated way. To collect such large volume of data and to ensure their integrity, a tool to automatically mine open source version control systems has been used. The main result of this study is the identification of a recurrent pattern of four kinds of contributors with the same characteristics in all the projects analyzed even if the projects are very different in domain, size, language, etc.

Let’s Leave the Bias to the Mainstream Media: A Wikipedia Community Fighting for Information Neutrality

Let’s Leave the Bias to the Mainstream Media: A Wikipedia Community Fighting for Information Neutrality

Volunteers' participation in open source software development

Open source software comprises a revolutionary new model of software development and distribution. Widespread Internet access in the early 1990s led to a dramatic acceleration of open source activity; but the success of a community open source project depends on the developers' voluntary participation. This paper investigates the social-relational factors, including developers' identification and obligation, shared goals, cognitive and affective trust, and their effects on open source software developer's participation. Data were collected from voluntary developers in open source projects. The research findings show that the social-relational factors are very important to promote developer's participation in an open source project. This research contributes empirically to the body of open source software research, and has practical implications for open source software development.

Understanding Developers’ Motives in Open Source Projects: A Multi-Theoretical Framework

The question of why so many developers dedicate time and effort into contributing to Open Source Projects (OSP) is one of the most intriguing questions in OS research. Several preliminary studies have theorized about and empirically examined this challenging question. They suggest a variety of reasons to explain this phenomenon but mostly rely on self-determination theory, with its extrinsic-intrinsic dichotomy, to explain the heterogeneous and complex nature of motivation in OS. This paper provides an alternative, theory-driven approach, where three different, yet complementary, theories of motivation are combined, to explain the participation and outcomes of developers in OSP. More specifically, our multi-theoretical framework is based upon, social exchange theory, goal-orientation and expectancy theory. An empirical test of the model is provided within the context of SourceForge.net. The results offer new theoretical and practical insights into developers’ motivation and how it affects their participation and outcomes.

Motivation of software developers in Open Source projects: an Internet-based survey of contributors to the Linux kernel

The motives of 141 contributors to a large Open Source Software (OSS) project (the Linux kernel) was explored with an Internet-based questionnaire study. Measured factors were both derived from discussions within the Linux community as well as from models from social sciences. Participants’ engagement was particularly determined by their identification as a Linux developer, by pragmatic motives to improve own software, and by their tolerance of time investments. Moreover, some of the software development was accomplished by teams. Activities in these teams were particularly determined by participants’ evaluation of the team goals as well as by their perceived indispensability and self-efficacy.