Previous studies on issue tracking systems for open source software (OSS) focused mainly on requests for bug fixes. However, requests to add a new feature or an improvement to an OSS project are often also made in an issue tracking system. These inquiries are particularly important because they determine the further development of the software. This study examines if there is any difference between requests of the IBM developer community and other sources in terms of the likelihood of successful implementation. Our study consists of a case study of the issue tracking system BugZilla in the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE). Our hypothesis, which was that feature requests from outsiders have less chances of being implemented, than feature requests from IBM developers, was confirmed.
The existence of a community plays a central role in the development of Open Source Software (OSS). Communities are commonly defined as a group of people sharing common norms or values. The common interest of an OSS project is obvious: to develop software under an OSS license. When we look at the rather general definition of a community, we see that there is a similarity to the term 'organization'. This paper draws parallels between OSS projects and the general elements of an organization and shows the different elements comprised in an OSS community: people, organization and assets. Each of those elements is enriched with examples from different research in the corresponding OSS research stream and provides a broad overview of the elements of OSS projects. With the help of this comparison, research on OSS can be made more focused and aligned with organizational research.
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