Open Source Software Development Projects Research Articles

Understanding participation and corporatization in service of diversity in free/libre and open source software development projects

Issues associated with a lack of diversity and inclusivity persist in the domain of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) development and in software development generally. Researchers have suggested that the corporatization of FLOSS affords opportunities for creating an inclusive workforce. To understand the potential for firms to increase diversity, we conducted a mixed-methods study of diversity and corporate engagement in FLOSS projects. We integrate the results of a qualitative survey and a big data analysis to understand developer perceptions of corporate engagement and its association with gender and geographic diversity. In the qualitative component, we collected responses from 64 FLOSS contributors to elicit their perspectives on corporate engagement. In the quantitative component, we analyzed GitHub data from 38 projects and 9,990 contributors to investigate differences in participation and diversity based on corporate engagement. We find that contributors vary across dimensions that can inform diversity interventions: stances toward corporations and orientation towards individual/collective benefits. Our results suggest that corporate engagement may limit a project's contributor base and geographic diversity. Yet, organizations subsidizing FLOSS have opportunities to increase access to projects which would benefit diversity. This research serves to identify individual and organizational factors which may harm and help diversity initiatives.

Methodology for collective location fixing of observed emergencies by intersection/resection based on mobile telecomunication application with cartographic interface

In modern higher education, it is required not only to prepare students to perform work on finished tasks in the subject area they have studied. It is also necessary to prepare students for independent activities, in which students do not work on ready-made tasks, but, on the contrary, are looking for niches in business, in which they themselves can offer in the subject area they have mastered, business-demanded solutions. This is another area of activity, which also requires development while studying at a university. It can be defined as "entrepreneurial competencies of a student." In recent years, the direction "Startup as a Diploma" has been developing, in which a university graduate protects not conditional academic work, but a real technological project with business prospects, to which the students developing it have ownership rights. The creation and maintenance of such projects changes the relationship between student and teacher, for this activity it is necessary to change the traditional teaching methodology. As a task of teachers, we decided to do the following: Find a subject area related to IT development, in which, due to recent achievements, there are opportunities for fast, technically not very complex technological solutions available to students, with the help of which you can create popular solutions. The work proposes an open source software development project, within which students can, performing tasks that are feasible for themselves, create software applications that are in demand in practice, as well as develop development strategies for related business projects. The project is dedicated to solving the problem of determining the coordinates of observed objects and phenomena based on data entered simultaneously by several users in different places using household mobile devices without using special technological equipment such as theodolites or tacheometers. The authors developed a mobile application, the value of which lies in the fact that in the public field allows you to realize the monitoring potential of the population interested in preventing unwanted or dangerous events and preventing emergency situations; professional allows you to assess the quality of the navigation signal in conditions of possible targeted interference; in the educational aspect organize training in the methods of joint fixation of objects and target designation on educational geopolygons. Currently, the project is being developed by students of the Department of Data Analysis and Machine Learning of the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation and the Moscow State University of Geodesy and Cartography. This paper presents a description of the project, the proposed solution architecture. References to source code repositories are given. The results of the pilot versions of the software are given.

Automated Identification of Toxic Code Reviews Using ToxiCR

Toxic conversations during software development interactions may have serious repercussions on a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development project. For example, victims of toxic conversations may become afraid to express themselves, therefore get demotivated, and may eventually leave the project. Automated filtering of toxic conversations may help a FOSS community maintain healthy interactions among its members. However, off-the-shelf toxicity detectors perform poorly on a software engineering dataset, such as one curated from code review comments. To counter this challenge, we present ToxiCR , a supervised learning based toxicity identification tool for code review interactions. ToxiCR includes a choice to select one of the 10 supervised learning algorithms, an option to select text vectorization techniques, eight preprocessing steps, and a large-scale labeled dataset of 19,651 code review comments. Two out of those eight preprocessing steps are software engineering domain specific. With our rigorous evaluation of the models with various combinations of preprocessing steps and vectorization techniques, we have identified the best combination for our dataset that boosts 95.8% accuracy and an 88.9% F1-score in identifying toxic texts. ToxiCR significantly outperforms existing toxicity detectors on our dataset. We have released our dataset, pre-trained models, evaluation results, and source code publicly, which is available at https://github.com/WSU-SEAL/ToxiCR .

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.

Elaborating Validation Scenarios Based on the Context Analysis and Combinatorial Method: Example of the Power-Efficiency Framework Innomterics

The preliminary task of a project consists of the definition of the scenarios that will guide further development work and validate the results. In this paper, we present an approach for the systematic generation of validation scenarios using a specifically developed taxonomy and combinatorial testing. We applied this approach to our research project for the development of the energy-efficiency evaluation framework named Innometrics. We described in detail all steps for taxonomy creation, generation of abstract validation scenarios, and identification of relevant industrial and academic case studies. We created the taxonomy of the target computer systems and then elaborated test cases using combinatorial testing. The classification criteria were the type of the system, its purpose, enabling hardware components and connectivity technologies, basic design patterns, programming language, and development lifecycle. The combinatorial testing results in 13 cases for one-way test coverage, which was considered enough to create a comprehensive test suite. We defined the case study for each particular scenario. These case studies represent the real industrial, educational, and open-source software development projects that will be used in further work on the Innometrics project.

More Is Not Necessarily Better: An Absorptive Capacity Perspective on Network Effects in Open Source Software Development Communities

Previous research has predominantly taken a social network perspective suggesting that building more network connections or becoming deeply embedded in a network provides a better position to access network knowledge in open source software communities.This perspective implicitly assumes that accessed network knowledge automatically gets absorbed and transferred to projects, so that building more and deeper network connections is beneficial: Drawing from an absorptive capacity perspective, this research challenges such conventional wisdom, arguing instead that the benefits depend on a project’s absorptive capacity. Network connections provide access to external knowledge in the community; the absorption and transfer of this new knowledge require appropriate internal knowledge and developer roles. With longitudinal data collected from 4,518 open source software development projects hosted at SourceForge, the authors show that knowledge breadth (depth) helps with the absorption of external knowledge achieved from network depth (breadth), but it inhibits the absorption of external knowledge obtained from network breadth (depth). Further, developer roles (e.g., bridge members, role diversity) can mitigate the negative consequences of suboptimal combinations and facilitate effective transfers of absorbed external knowledge across and within projects. These findings provide important theoretical and managerial implications for managing network connections, knowledge, and developer roles in open source software communities.

Project leaders as boundary spanners in open source software development: A resource dependence perspective

AbstractDigital social innovation is important for addressing various social needs, especially from those who are economically disadvantaged. For instance, open source software (OSS) is developed by mass collaboration on digital communities to provide software users free alternatives to commercial products. OSS is particularly valuable to meet the needs of numerous disadvantaged users for whom proprietary software is not affordable. While OSS projects are lack of formal organizational structure, project leaders play a significant role in initiating and managing these projects and eventually, influencing the degree to which the developed software is used and liked by users. Drawing on resource dependence theory, we investigate the impacts of two team‐level characteristics of OSS project leaders (ie, size and tenure) on how well the developed software can address users' needs, with regard to the quantity of software being used by users and the quality of software to users' satisfaction. Further, from a resource dependence perspective, we examine the moderating role of project leaders' network ties in shaping the contingency of these effects. By using a large‐scale dataset from 43 048 OSS development projects in SourceForge community, we find empirical evidence corroborating our theory. Taken together, our findings suggest the boundary‐spanning role of project leaders in developing digital social innovation.

The role of openness in open collaboration: A focus on open‐source software development projects

Open-source software development projects are well suited for exploring new ideas and acquiring knowledge from developers outside of the project. In...

Teaching citizen scientists to categorize glitches using machine learning guided training

Existing literature points to scaffolded training as an effective yet resource-intensive approach to help newcomers learn and stay motivated. Experts need to select relevant learning materials and continuously assess learners' progress. Peer production communities such as Wikipedia and Open Source Software Development projects face the additional problem of turning volunteers into productive participants as soon as possible. To address these challenges, we designed and tested a training regime combining scaffolded instruction and machine learning to select learning materials and gradually introduces new materials to individuals as their competences improve. We evaluated the training regime on 386 participants that contribute to Gravity Spy, an online citizen science project where people are asked to categorize glitches to assist scientists in the search for gravitational waves. Volunteers were assigned to one of two conditions; (1) a machine learning guided training (MLGT) system that continuously assesses volunteers skill level and adjusts the learning materials or (2) an unscaffolded training program where all learning materials were administered at once. Our analysis revealed that volunteers in the MLGT condition were more accurate on the categorization task (an average accuracy of 90% vs. 54%), executed more tasks (an average of 228 vs. 121 tasks), and were retained for a longer period (an average of 2.5 vs. 2 sessions) than volunteers in the unscaffolded training. The results suggest that MLGT is an effective pedagogical approach for training volunteers in categorization tasks and increases volunteers’ motivation.

Barriers Faced by Women in Software Development Projects

Computer science is a predominantly male field of study. Women face barriers while trying to insert themselves in the study of computer science. Those barriers extend to when women are exposed to the professional area of computer science. Despite decades of social fights for gender equity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education and in computer science in general, few women participate in computer science, and some of the reasons include gender bias and lack of support for women when choosing a computer science career. Open source software development has been increasingly used by companies seeking the competitive advantages gained by team diversity. This diversification of the characteristics of team members includes, for example, the age of the participants, the level of experience, education and knowledge in the area, and their gender. In open source software projects women are underrepresented and a series of biases are involved in their participation. This paper conducts a systematic literature review with the objective of finding factors that could assist in increasing women’s interest in contributing to open source communities and software development projects. The main contributions of this paper are: (i) identification of factors that cause women’s lack of interest (engagement), (ii) possible solutions to increase the engagement of this public, (iii) to outline the profile of professional women who are participating in open source software projects and software development projects. The main findings of this research reveal that women are underrepresented in software development projects and in open source software projects. They represent less than 10% of the total developers and the main causes of this underrepresentation may be associated with their workplace conditions, which reflect male gender bias.

Exploring and Expanding GSE Education with Open Source Software Development

Global software engineering (GSE) courses traditionally require cooperation between at least two universities so as to provide a distributed development environment to the students. In this study, we explore an alternative way to organize a global software engineering course where students work on open source software development (OSSD) projects rather than in a multi-university collaboration setting. The results show that the new setup may provide core GSE challenges as well as challenges associated with software development outsourcing and challenges related to working on large open source software. The present article compares the experiences gained from running a combined GSE and OSSD course against the experiences gained from running a traditional GSE course. The two alternatives are compared in terms of students’ learning outcomes and course organization. The authors found that a combined GSE and OSSD course provides learning opportunities that are partly overlapping with, and partly complementary to, a traditional GSE course. The authors also found that the combined OSSD and GSE course was somewhat easier to organize because most of the activities took place in a single university setting. The authors used the extended GSE taxonomy for the comparison and found it to be a useful tool for this, although it had some limitations in expressive power. Therefore, two additional relationship dimensions are proposed that will further enrich the extended taxonomy in classifying GSE (and OSSD) projects.

When less is more: coordinating innovation in open versus closed source software development

This paper compares the coordination effort required for innovative work in a typical firm and in an open source software development project. It concludes that the open mode of organising requires a lower amount of coordination compared to the closed mode typical of firms. The reasons for this finding are a reduced need for subsystem differentiation, task variability and interdependence in open source software development. The open mode is therefore interesting for entrepreneurial ventures striving to overcome limited resources. It has two advantages: it creates fewer costs and is better suited to generating innovative output compared to the closed model used in firms. This conceptual paper builds on the literature on open organisations, the open source software phenomenon and contingency theory. It illustrates its theoretical findings with two cases (Microsoft and the Arch Linux open source project).

When less is more: coordinating innovation in open versus closed source software development

This paper compares the coordination effort required for innovative work in a typical firm and in an open source software development project. It concludes that the open mode of organising requires a lower amount of coordination compared to the closed mode typical of firms. The reasons for this finding are a reduced need for subsystem differentiation, task variability and interdependence in open source software development. The open mode is therefore interesting for entrepreneurial ventures striving to overcome limited resources. It has two advantages: it creates fewer costs and is better suited to generating innovative output compared to the closed model used in firms. This conceptual paper builds on the literature on open organisations, the open source software phenomenon and contingency theory. It illustrates its theoretical findings with two cases (Microsoft and the Arch Linux open source project).

Consensus formation in non-hierarchical organizations: An inductive study

Although the knowledge economy has been posing challenges to the key premises of a formal hierarchy, most contemporary organizations remain hierarchical. A traditional explanation for this puzzle lies in the presumed limits of peer-to-peer dispute resolution. We investigate this assumption through an inductive study of the emergence of consensus in non-hierarchical organizations (i.e., open source software development projects hosted on GitHub). We sample discussions on software license choices and uncover new insights about the resolution of disputes over strategic decisions in the absence of hierarchical authority. We find important differences between consensus around an initial choice (a “Greenfield” decision) and the revision of the initial choice (a “Brownfield” decision) in terms of the process of consensus formation. Our inductive data analyses also shows that consensus may be more likely for groups with greater polarization ex ante and groups with a larger number of participants, suggesting that scale and polarization may transform the nature of the discussion from a judgmental one to an intellective one. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of these findings.

An Environment for detection of Bugs through SVM

Mining technique finds hidden patterns from the data stored in the repositories and turn it into useful information and knowledge. Most open source software development projects include an open bug repository in which users of the software can gain full access. Training data size for bug priority classification using SVM.In this paper, calculate the precision and recall of different features categories for each class. The bug report having status value NEW, UNCONFIRMED, ASSIGNED bugs are not included in our training .because the priority level of these classifications may not be authentic. A trigger’s task is to manage the bug repository so that it contains only real bugs and important bugs are addressed quickly. We also use the precision and recall that can be used to measure the accuracy of the classifier. For a bug priority classification we need high precision and recall especially for higher priorities.

How do firms influence open source software communities? A framework and empirical analysis of different governance modes

This paper explores how software firms can apply different types of governance approaches to open source software development projects (OSSDPs) and draws on control theory to propose that firms may influence OSSDPs by employing either leadership or resource deployment control. A matrix differentiating four types of OSSDPs: firm- versus community-initiated projects and one participating firm (single-vendor projects) versus many firms (multivendor projects), and accompanying hypotheses regarding a firm's participation for each type are developed. Using data from 83 Eclipse projects to test the hypotheses, findings indicate that (1) firms more actively employ both leadership and resource deployment in firm-initiated projects than in community-initiated ones and (2) firms are more likely to use resource deployment control over leadership control in multivendor projects. Key theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

A Comprehensive Theoretical Framework for a Better Understanding of Motivations of Participants in OSS Development Projects: A Meta-Research Approach

Participants in Open Source Software (OSS) development projects usually contribute voluntarily without expecting direct compensation for their work. One of the central puzzles raised by the success of OSS is the motivation of the participants; why topnotch programmers choose to write software that is released for no fee. In order to respond to this peculiarity employing a metaresearch method, we first identify and review theoretical perspectives from diverse disciplines including economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, psychology, and management. Then, we suggest a comprehensive framework that provides a holistic understanding of the puzzle in question. Reviewing key empirical studies based on the suggested framework, we also suggest a future research agenda.

StatBase: library statistics made easy

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to detail a Library open source software (OSS) development project resulting in the launch of StatBase, a statistical gathering and data visualization tool, so that organizations can adopt a locally managed alternative to costly data aggregation tools. Design/methodology/approach – This case study is based on a literature review, Agile development framework, and user experience modeling. The software solution features a Joomla framework with contributed modules and open source architecture. Findings – This case study demonstrates the creation and practical implementation of a scalable OSS platform for data management and analysis. Practical implications – Provides a frame of reference and methodology for libraries, both public and academic, seeking to implement a web-based resource to gather, organize, and interpret statistical metrics via a centralized, lightweight, open source architecture. Originality/value – This case study provides a detailed scope and step-by-step technology process description by which an organization can adopt or model the StatBase solution for business metrics.

Research Note—Continued Participation in Online Innovation Communities: Does Community Response Matter Equally for Everyone?

In this study, we focus on the factors that influence online innovation community members' continued participation in the context of open source software development (OSSD) communities. Prior research on continued participation in online communities has primarily focused on social interactions among members and benefits obtained from these interactions. However, members of these communities often play different roles, which have been examined extensively, albeit in a separate stream of research. This study attempts to bridge these two streams of research by investigating the joint influence of community response and members' roles on continued participation. We categorize OSSD community members into users and modifiers and empirically examine the differential effects of community response across these roles. By analyzing a longitudinal data set of activities in the discussion forums of more than 300 OSSD projects, we not only confirm the positive influence of community response on members' continued participation but also find that community response is more influential in driving the continuance behavior of users than that of modifiers. In addition, this research highlights the importance of modifiers, a key subgroup of OSSD participants that has been largely overlooked by prior research.

Open Source Software Development Process Model

The global open source movement has provided software users with more choices, lower software acquisition cost, more flexible software customization, and possibly higher quality software product. Although the development of open source software is dynamic and it encourages innovations, the process can be chaotic and involve members around the globe. An Open Source Software Development (OSSD) process model to enhance the survivability of OSSD projects is needed. This research uses the grounded theory approach to derive a Phase-Role-Skill-Responsibility (PRSR) OSSD process model. The three OSSD process phases -- Launch Stage, Before the First Release, and Between Releases -- address the characteristics of the OSSD process as well as factors that influence the OSSD process. In the PRSR model, different roles/actors are required to have different skills and responsibilities corresponding to each of the three OSSD process phases. This qualitative research contributes to the software development literature as well as open source practice.