Open Source Software Development Research Articles

Upstream First: An Ethnographic Study of Open Source Software Community

This research aims to trace the formation and development of community- based innovation. Based on a 14-month ethnographic study in 10 open source communities, I systematically summarized the working mechanisms of open source software development. I identified four fundamental factors that underpin open source communities, including economy of community-based maintenance, iterative generation of value, incentives of professional networking, and entrepreneurship of core teams. A comprehensive framework incorporating these four factors is then constructed, which provides a dynamic process-based snowball model to explain the heterogeneity of open source communities. This perspective can even be applied in a broader research context to analyze the uncertainty and dynamic generation of knowledge transfer and to study the iterative nature of technological innovation. In contrast to previous literature, my field research suggests that there is convergence rather than divergence between community-based innovation and intra-firm R&D, thus opening up many possibilities for future research, such as comparing open source with closed source and exploring hybrid models of organizational innovation.

An empirical study of emoji use in software development communication

Similar to social media platforms , people use emojis in software development related communication to enrich the context and convey additional emotion. With the increasing emoji use in software development-related communication, it has become important to understand why software developers are using emojis and their impact. Gaining a deeper understanding is essential because the intention of emoji usage might be affected by the demographics and experience of developers; also, frequency and the distribution of emoji usage might change depending on the activity, stage of the development, and nature of the conversation, etc. We present a large-scale empirical study on the intention of emoji usage conducted on 2,712 Open Source Software (OSS) projects. We build a machine learning model to automate classifying the intentions behind emoji usage in 39,980 posts. We also surveyed 60 open-source software developers from 17 countries to understand developers’ perceptions of why and when emojis are used. Our results show that we can classify the intention of emoji usage with high accuracy (AUC of 0.97). In addition, the results indicate that developers use emoji for varying intentions, and emoji usage intention changes throughout a conversation. Our study opens a new avenue in Software Engineering research related to automatically identifying the intention of the emoji use that can help improve the communication efficiency and help project maintainers monitor and ensure the quality of communication. Another thread of future research could look into what intentions of emoji usage or what kind of emojis are more likely to attract users and how that is associated with emoji usage diffusion in different levels (threads, projects, etc.)

PLCOjs, a FAIR GWAS web SDK for the NCI Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian Cancer Genetic Atlas project.

The Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG) and the Division of Cancer Prevention (DCP) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have recently generated genome-wide association study (GWAS) data for multiple traits in the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian (PLCO) Genomic Atlas project. The GWAS included 110000 participants. The dissemination of the genetic association data through a data portal called GWAS Explorer, in a manner that addresses the modern expectations of FAIR reusability by data scientists and engineers, is the main motivation for the development of the open-source JavaScript software development kit (SDK) reported here. The PLCO GWAS Explorer resource relies on a public stateless HTTP application programming interface (API) deployed as the sole backend service for both the landing page's web application and third-party analytical workflows. The core PLCOjs SDK is mapped to each of the API methods, and also to each of the reference graphic visualizations in the GWAS Explorer. A few additional visualization methods extend it. As is the norm with web SDKs, no download or installation is needed and modularization supports targeted code injection for web applications, reactive notebooks (Observable) and node-based web services. code at https://github.com/episphere/plco; project page at https://episphere.github.io/plco.

Innovating beyond firm boundaries: resource deployment control in open source software development

PurposeIn times of open and distributed innovation, many innovation activities that are important for firms' products and services take place beyond the boundaries of the firm and thus beyond firms' direct control. A prime example for this phenomenon is open source software (OSS) development, where multiple actors contribute to a public good, which is also integrated into company-owned software products. Despite the importance of aligning community work on the public good with own in-house development efforts, firms have limited options to directly control the OSS project or the project's outcome. This research reflects on resource deployment control, a control mode in which firms assign own developers to work for an OSS project to influence the OSS project, and tests hypotheses on individual developer levels.Design/methodology/approachThis research tests the effect of perceived resource deployment control on opinion leadership by analyzing employed Linux kernel developers.FindingsThe findings show that developers who perceive being assigned to an OSS project to enact control also exhibit opinion leadership. This research also investigates boundary conditions such as the OSS business model a firm operates and the reputation developers assign to the developers' employer.Originality/valueThis research is the first that is devoted to resource deployment control, and the research closes with a discussion of implications for control theory and the management of innovation beyond firm boundaries.

A Theoretical Framework for Enhancing Open-Source Software Security

Cyber security is a rapidly developing field and open-source software (OSS) is being led by a collaborative community and a transparent nature. This research intends to make a theoretical framework highlighting the symbiosis of community engagement models, governance models, and the security of open-source ecosystems. The significant purposes aim to investigate how community engagement affects open source software development, analyze the deployment of the governance systems in widely used open source projects, and create the theoretical model that brings the cybersecurity processes in those practices. The literature survey covers existing research on open-source software development, community engagement, governance models, and cybersecurity practices within the OSS ecosystem. Through literature review the basic concepts are investigated using conceptual analysis to determine which principles and mechanisms the Community Model Engagement and Governance models operate, influencing the security of Open Source Software. Open-source project policy recommendations are the foundation for the security of communities where members fully contribute to better governance. This includes developing a fundamental conceptual analysis to lay out the framework's principles and operation (mechanisms). This contributes to the overall development of the theoretical framework. This research expects to develop a standardized theoretical framework that tackles the community engagement-governance models-security software link from new and insightful perspectives. Practical policy recommendations to protect OSS projects will be presented to solve the cybersecurity problem easily and immediately. This study aims to add to the academic and practical discussions that focus on human and organizational components' critical roles in securing open-source software. The discussion of theoretical aspects gives this platform a unique angle that fits well into the technical approach while improving the understanding of a legally open cybersecurity community

A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack.

Technical collaboration between multiple contributors is a natural phenomenon in distributed open source software development projects. Macro-collaboration, where each code commit is attributed to a single collaborator, has been extensively studied in the research literature. This is much less the case for so-called micro-collaboration practices, in which multiple authors contribute to the same commit. To support such practices, GitLab and GitHub started supporting social coding mechanisms such as the “Co-Authored-By:” trailers in commit messages, which, in turn, enable to empirically study such micro-collaboration. In order to understand the mechanisms, benefits and limitations of micro-collaboration, this article provides an exemplar case study of collaboration practices in the OpenStack ecosystem. Following a mixed-method research approach we provide qualitative evidence through a thematic and content analysis of semi-structured interviews with 16 OpenStack contributors. We contrast their perception with quantitative evidence gained by statistical analysis of the git commit histories (sim 1M commits) and Gerrit code review histories (sim 631K change sets and sim 2M patch sets) of 1,804 OpenStack project repositories over a 9-year period. Our findings provide novel empirical insights to practitioners to promote micro-collaborative coding practices, and to academics to conduct further research towards understanding and automating the micro-collaboration process.

SnappView, a Software Development Kit for Supporting End-user Mobile Interface Review

This paper presents SnappView, an open-source software development kit that facilitates end-user review of graphical user interfaces for mobile applications and streamlines their input into a continuous design life cycle. SnappView structures this user interface review process into four cumulative stages: (1) a developer creates a mobile application project with user interface code instrumented by only a few instructions governing SnappView and deploys the resulting application on an application store; (2) any tester, such as an end-user, a designer, a reviewer, while interacting with the instrumented user interface, shakes the mobile device to freeze and capture its screen and to provide insightful multimodal feedback such as textual comments, critics, suggestions, drawings by stroke gestures, voice or video records, with a level of importance; (3) the screenshot is captured with the application, browser, and status data and sent with the feedback to SnappView server; and (4) a designer then reviews collected and aggregated feedback data and passes them to the developer to address raised usability problems. Another cycle then initiates an iterative design. This paper presents the motivations and process for performing mobile application review based on SnappView. Based on this process, we deployed on the AppStore "WeTwo", a real-world mobile application to find various personal activities over a one-month period with 420 active users. This application served for a user experience evaluation conducted with N1=14 developers to reveal the advantages and shortcomings of the toolkit from a development point of view. The same application was also used in a usability evaluation conducted with N2=22 participants to reveal the advantages and shortcomings from an end-user viewpoint.

Global Good Open Source Software Development in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic - Perspectives from SORMAS Implementation in Europe.

In recent years, software has evolved from being static, closed source, proprietary products to being dynamic, open source, ecosystems contributing to the global good. To this end, the open source software (OSS) solution and global good, Surveillance Outbreak Response Management and Analysis System (SORMAS), rapidly adjusted to the demands of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak by introducing a COVID-19 module. This allowed countries that were already making use of the software as part of their public health surveillance infrastructure to make use of the new module in order to respond to the pandemic. New countries in continental Europe, most notably Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and France subsequently chose to adopt the software for public health surveillance purposes for the first time during 2020, requiring additional adaptations to meet local needs. As a result, in this paper, we aim to gain a better understanding of how rapidly SORMAS was adapted to meet global needs by analyzing the SORMAS COVID-19 module introduction timeline, as well as the overall development activity of the software during 2020 and 2021 in response to the pandemic. Favorable initial feature response times in combination with development scale-up possibilities speak to some of the potential advantages of implementing global good OSS tools such as SORMAS for public health surveillance, in response to an emergency. Overall, SORMAS serves as proof of concept for developing a global good OSS solution on an international scale.

Landslides Susceptibility Mapping in R Program (Case study in Lima Puluh Kota Regency)

Landslide susceptibility zonation is necessary to be considered in land use planning at various scales., different approaches and analytical methods can be used to evaluate and zone the area and processed with GIS software. However, there are constraints in its use, such as the cost of the licenses of software and source code that cannot be accessed and evaluated by users. The recent development of open-source software that can integrate data, analysis, and graphs in a representation such as the R program, has opened up opportunities for researchers to reevaluate and modify interpretation further from available ones to address issues. In this regard, this study aims to create functions in R using the Weight of Evidence (WoE) method, a form of bivariate statistic approach to acquire the significant factors controlling landslides and generate a susceptibility map. The case study is located in Limapuluh Kota Regency, West Sumatra Province of Indonesia, a hilly and mountainous region where its districts are prone to landslides. Eight of eleven factors such as geology, landform, land cover, elevation, density of vegetation greenness, slope, rainfall intensity, and proximity to stream were regarded to control landslides which set up four classes of landslide susceptibility zone (very low, low, moderate, and high).

EveryBOTy Counts: Examining Human-Machine Teams in Open Source Software Development.

In this study, we explore the future of work by examining differences in productivity when teams are composed of only humans or both humans and machine agents. Our objective was to characterize the similarities and differences between human and human-machine teams as they work to coordinate across their specialized roles. This form of research is increasingly important given that machine agents are becoming commonplace in sociotechnical systems and playing a more active role in collaborative work. One particular class of machine agents, bots, is being introduced to these systems to facilitate both taskwork and teamwork. We investigated the association between bots and productivity outcomes in open source software development through an analysis of hundreds of project teams. The presence of bots in teams was associated with higher levels of productivity and higher work centralization in addition to greater amounts of observed communication. The adoption of bots in software teams may have tradeoffs, in that doing so may increase productivity, but could also increase workload. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for advancing human-machine teaming research.

Software reliability model of open source software based on the decreasing trend of fault introduction

Open source software (OSS) has become one of the modern software development methods. OSS is mainly developed by developers, volunteers, and users all over the world, but its reliability has been widely questioned. When OSS faults are detected, volunteers or users send them to developers by email or network. After the developer confirms the fault, it will be randomly assigned to the debugger who may be a developer, a volunteer, or a user. These open source community contributors also have the phenomenon of learning when removing faults. When the detected faults are removed, the number of introduced faults decreases gradually. Therefore, this study proposes a software reliability model with the decreasing trend of fault introduction in the process of OSS development and testing. The validity of the proposed model and the accuracy of estimating residual faults are verified by experiments. The proposed model can be used to evaluate the reliability and predict the remaining faults in the actual OSS development and testing process.

A Comparative Performance Analysis on GIS based Web Development using Geoserver versus without using Geoserver

The main objective of this paper is to use of open source geospatial and software development technologies. Technologies emerging day by day, Internet make this possible, to connect across the world from one point and collect information of whole world. We can also collect data of earth through satellite imagery. GIS played a vital role in development, it make data visualize, store, analyze and helps in making of maps. It is able to analyses past data and present data based on that make future predictions. Now a day, All the data is collected with its geographical extents, this data is prepared as Geo-spatial data, it can be easily show on maps. The portal developed based on GIS makes better experience and interactive for users. We can easily make planning and other decision making.

Has Covid-19 increased gender inequalities in professional advancement? Cross-country evidence on productivity differences between male and female software developers

Objective: This article analyzed gender differences in professional advancement following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic based on data from open-source software developers in 37 countries.
 Background: Men and women may have been affected differently from the social distancing measures implemented to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. Given that men and women tend to work in different jobs and that they have been unequally involved in childcare duties, school and workplace closings may have impacted men’s and women’s professional lives unequally.
 Method: We analyzed original data from the world’s largest social coding community, GitHub. We first estimated a Holt-Winters forecast model to compare the predicted and the observed average weekly productivity of a random sample of male and female developers (N=177,480) during the first lockdown period in 2020. To explain the cross-country variation in the gendered effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on software developers’ productivity, we estimated two-way fixed effects models with different lockdown measures as predictors – school and workplace closures, in particular.
 Results: In most countries, both male and female developers were, on average, more productive than predicted, and productivity increased for both genders with increasing lockdown stringency. When examining the effects of the most relevant types of lockdown measures separately, we found that stay-at-home restrictions increased both men’s and women’s productivity and that workplace closures also increased the number of weekly contributions on average – but for women, only when schools were open.
 Conclusion: Having found gender differences in the effect of workplace closures contingent on school and daycare closures within a population that is relatively young and unlikely to have children (software developers), we conclude that the Covid-19 pandemic may indeed have contributed to increased gender inequalities in professional advancement.

The Geography of Open Source Software: Evidence from GitHub

Open Source Software (OSS) plays an important role in the digital economy. Yet although software production is amenable to remote collaboration and its outputs are easily shared across distances, software development seems to cluster geographically in places such as Silicon Valley, London, or Berlin. And while recent work indicates that OSS activity creates positive externalities which accrue locally through knowledge spillovers and information effects, up-to-date data on the geographic distribution of active open source developers is limited. This presents a significant blindspot for policymakers, who tend to promote OSS at the national level as a cost-saving tool for public sector institutions. We address this gap by geolocating more than half a million active contributors to GitHub in early 2021 at various spatial scales. Compared to results from 2010, we find a significant increase in the share of developers based in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, suggesting a more even spread of OSS developers globally. Within countries, however, we find significant concentration in regions, exceeding the concentration of workers in high-tech fields. Social and economic development indicators predict at most half of regional variation in OSS activity in the EU, suggesting that clusters of OSS have idiosyncratic roots. We argue that policymakers seeking to foster OSS should focus locally rather than nationally, using the tools of cluster policy to support networks of OSS developers.

Design and Develop the B2C Farming Information System Solution using Mobile and Web Geospatial Development Technologies for Smart Supply Chain of Fruit Crops of UP, India

The main objective of writing this paper is to use innovative blend of open source geospatial and software development technologies, for maximizing benefits to both exporter/buyer and grower/farmer, by establishing smart supply chain of the fruit crops of UP, India The striving endeavour drone to build and/or utilize develop GIS, web GIS Portal, and Mobile Application by synergizing computer . In this, this anomalous problem can be solved by creating a web GIS portal and mobile application by coordinating computer science, GIS, remote sensing and mobile technology. After analyzing the satellite remote sensing data, the information of various Orchards are extracted and converted to GIS feature geodatabase. The format is converted and imported into the mobile application, with the help of Geographical Coordinates, the fruit related information of their field be filled by grower/farmer through handy user-friendly vernacular Mobile Application. The submitted information pulled on created user-friendly GIS Portal. After filling it, the web will be updated automatically on the GIS portal. With the help of latitude and longitude, all the information of crop information of the farmer such as which variety of fruit is available in the field and how much quantity can be filled in the mobile application. After filling it, the web will be updated automatically on the GIS portal. All buyer's list will already be available on the web GIS portal, this will end the problems of both the farmer and the buyer.

Toward Empathetic Digital Repositories: An Interview with Diego Pino Navarro

Diego Pino Navarro is a systems architect and open source software developer from Chile. He is the Assistant Director for Digital Strategy at the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) where he manages the digital services team. Diego is also the Lead Architect of Archipelago Commons, an open source digital library software for cultural heritage materials.

How Can We Ensure Reproducibility and Clinical Translation of Machine Learning Applications in Laboratory Medicine?

Recent studies demonstrating problems with COVID (1) and sepsis (2) prediction models have helped raise awareness (3) about the need for better practices in developing and reporting machine learning (ML; or artificial intelligence) methods in healthcare. This so-called reproducibility (or replication) crisis has been recognized and extends beyond clinical applications (4). In fact, this issue is not specific to ML. Many scientific journals, including Clinical Chemistry, have adopted principles (specified in the article submission guidelines) to facilitate reproducibility, rigor, and transparency in published findings. Although there are common elements that support transparency and rigor in science, each technology has its own set of pitfalls that must be addressed. This is true for the rapidly developing field of ML. The growth and development of open-source software and digitized and publicly available data sources have made the application of ML methods highly accessible. While this has facilitated a surge in interest and publications, it has reduced the requirement for developers to have the necessary foundational or subject matter knowledge needed for quality publications and innovations. When ML methods are published in clinical journals, peer reviewers and editors may lack the expertise to appropriately evaluate technical aspects of submissions. Thus, we need best practices that help educate clinical experts and govern how ML for laboratory medicine should be developed and communicated. This is critical for ensuring practicality and reproducibility of ML applications and, ultimately, their successful translation to clinical practice.

The Impact of Peer Code Review on Software Maintainability in Open-Source Software: A Case Study

Recently, open-source software (OSS) has become a considerably popular and reliable source of functionality corrections. OSS also allows software developers to reduce technical debt in software development. However, previous studies have shown that the main problem within OSS development is the lack of systematic processes and formal documents related to system development, such as requirements, designs, and testing. This feature of OSS development causes problems in the software quality, such as those related to security and maintainability. In this research, the authors focused on the software’s maintainability because this attribute has to greatest potential to reduce the cost and increase the productivity of the software development process. There is currently no existing research that examines whether OSS developers pay attention to software maintainability. To better understand how OSS developers improve software maintainability, this research aims to answer the question: “Are developers interested in software maintainability under the modern code review of open-source software projects?” To answer the research question, the authors investigated the code review process in which the OSS developers changed the code based on a review of code comments related to maintenance and collected the sub-characteristics associated with software maintainability from the existing literature. The authors examined the review comments from two OSS projects: Eclipse and Qt. The results suggest that the number of code revisions due to maintenance issues was moderate and that the OSS developers tend to improve source code quality. This direction could be observed from the increasing number of modifications on given maintenance-based comments over the years. Therefore, an implication of this is the possibility that OSS project developers are interested in software maintainability.

Problems, Solutions, and Success Factors in the openMDM User-Led Open Source Consortium

Open-source software (OSS) development offers organizations an alternative to purchasing proprietary software or commissioning custom software. In one form of OSS development, organizations develop the software they need in collaboration with other organizations. If the software is used by the organizations to operate their business, such collaborations can lead to what we call “user-led open-source consortia” or “user-led OSS consortia”. Although this concept is not new, there have been few studies of user-led OSS consortia. The studies that examined user-led OSS consortia did so through the lens of OSS, but not from the inter-company collaboration perspective. User-led OSS consortia are a distinct phenomenon that share elements of inter-company collaboration, outsourcing software development, and vendor-led OSS development and cannot be understood by using only a single lens. To close this gap, we present problems and solutions in inter-company collaboration, outsourcing, and OSS literature, and present the results of a single-case study. We focus on problems in the early phases of a user-led open-source consortium, the openMDM consortium, and the solutions applied to these problems. Furthermore, we present the factors which lead this consortium to sustained growth.

Analysis of Code Cloning in Open-Source and Industrial Software Development Stages: A Perspective of Mobile Applications

Analysis of Code Cloning in Open-Source and Industrial Software Development Stages: A Perspective of Mobile Applications