Collaboration in open-source projects: myth or reality?

Tymchuk, Yuriy; Mocci, Andrea; Lanza, Michele

doi:10.1145/2597073.2597093

Cited by 13 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…It is the basis for sharing knowledge, experience, and skills among multiple team members to contribute to the development of a new product. In our context, software development is a collaborative problem‐solving activity where success is dependent upon knowledge acquisition, information sharing, and integration, and the minimization of communication breakdowns 20,21 . Indeed, software developers must collaborate in all software life‐cycle phases to successfully build software systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, understanding collaboration and how it can be improved with more effective tools and processes has long been a challenge in software engineering research and practice. In a different direction, other previous work proposes and evaluates models, 18,19 theories, 20,21 and tools 14,22,23 to support collaboration and to help developers in collaborative development tasks. For instance, Lanubile et al 14 enumerated several existing tools to support collaborative work along the software product life cycle.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Perceptions of open‐source software developers on collaborations: An interview and survey study

Constantino

Souza

Zhou

et al. 2021

J Software Evolu Process

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With the emergence of social coding platforms, collaboration has become a key and dynamic aspect to the success of software projects. In such platforms, developers have to collaborate and deal with issues of collaboration in open‐source software development. Although collaboration is challenging, collaborative development produces better software systems than any developer could produce alone. Several approaches have investigated collaboration challenges, for instance, by proposing or evaluating models and tools to support collaborative work. Despite the undeniable importance of the existing efforts in this direction, there are few works on collaboration from perspectives of developers. In this work, we aim to investigate the perceptions of open‐source software developers on collaborations, such as motivations, techniques, and tools to support global, productive, and collaborative development. Following an ad hoc literature review, an exploratory interview study with 12 open‐source software developers from GitHub, our novel approach for this problem also relies on an extensive survey with 121 developers to confirm or refute the interview results. We found different collaborative contributions, such as managing change requests. Besides, we observed that most collaborators prefer to collaborate with the core team instead of their peers. We also found that most collaboration happens in software development (60%) and maintenance (47%) tasks. Furthermore, despite personal preferences to work independently, developers still consider collaborating with others in specific task categories, for instance, software development. Finally, developers also expressed the importance of the social coding platforms, such as GitHub, to support maintainers, and contributors in making decisions and developing tasks of the projects. Therefore, these findings may help project leaders optimize the collaborations among developers and reduce entry barriers. Moreover, these findings may support the project collaborators in understanding the collaboration process and engaging others in the project.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptions of open‐source software developers on collaborations: An interview and survey study

Constantino

Souza

Zhou

et al. 2021

J Software Evolu Process

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…bug/issue reporting, discussions, code revisions etc.). As mentioned above, all these activities can be recorded on software repositories like GitHub, which can be used to generate an implicit developer social network (DSN) [2, 7, 8]. In particular, such DSNs can serve as tools to study the social collaboration features of developers in OSS projects that facilitate software engineering tasks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The key characteristic of VCS‐DSN links is undirected, which is caused by their joint patterns, like working on the same project, modifying the undistinguishable software entity etc. Therefore, the relationships among developers reside in source code, not an immediate direct communication, or collaboration [8, 10]. Thirdly, email‐based DSN is constructed if two developers communicate with each other by email, which creates a link between them in the email‐based DSN, thus; the relationships are direct and straightforward.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mining social collaboration patterns in developer social networks

Aljemabi

Wang

2020

IET softw.

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Software development is extremely complex, requiring collaboration between teams and developers who collaborate on various tasks; these activities lead to the generation of an implicit developer social network (DSN). The authors’ aim to understand the development process in terms of collaboration between developers. In this work, they conducted an empirical study on mining social collaboration patterns of DSNs for open source software projects based on an integrated approach involving the identification of global and local collaboration patterns among developers based on social network analysis. The bug tracking system‐based DSN (BTS‐DSN) is chosen as an example over the other DSNs since it incorporates larger collaboration activities and actors. The empirical results show that the DSNs, specifically BTS‐DSN, exhibits three different coordination pattern levels (Plan, Aware, and Reflexive) based on their collaboration activities. The mean time to repair metric proves that the Reflexive level occupies the fastest bug fixing time, then the Plan level comes secondly, and lastly the Aware level. In addition, each level group shows different collaboration behaviours among developers; thus, this information can be useful as a resource for better understanding of developer collaboration and collaboration awareness.

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“…We were able to identify this developer as the maintainer of the project. This so-called turnover in software projects is a common observation in the evolution of OSS projects [143,59,144].…”

Section: Software Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mining Developer Dynamics for Agent-Based Simulation of Software Evolution

Herbold¹

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The steady growth of software in our daily life results in the need for quicker adaption of the software changing usage and requirements. This process is defined as software evolution. Primarily, it is concerned with changes that are responsible for the evolution. The most important contribution to this process results from developers, e.g., by adding code to the repository. This process is highly dynamic as the team constellation as well as the activity of individual developers is always changing. This is especially the case for open-source software (OSS) projects which are analyzed in this thesis because of the free availability.We create and evaluate several models describing software evolution. The main focus of the approach described in this thesis is in the source of the changes, i.e., the developers. Using Agent-based simulation, project managers have the ability to try different scenarios and estimate possible software evolution trends. For example, it is possible to choose a team constellation and evaluate if the chosen team will be able to fix enough bugs using the simulation output. If not, more developers can be added to the simulation. In this case, the developers are agents who create, update, and delete software artifacts and possibly add or fix bugs at the same time. Huge parts of this thesis are dedicated to find suitable simulation parameters and estimate them by mining software repositories to gain a realistic simulation. Questions like the size of the software project, the activity of developers, the number of bugs, and the structure of the software under simulation can be answered. We apply methods from data mining, machine learning and statistics for our work.For the simulation, the behavior of developers is estimated using heuristics gained from analyzing the history of different software projects. The resulting simulation model reflects different developer roles with varying workload. Although, the representation of OSS dynamics was limited. For a fine-grained developer contribution behavior, a state-based probabilistic model (Hidden Markov Model) was trained based on different levels of codebased and communication-based activities. This allows the developers to switch between different of activity. The same procedure is used to summarize the whole project activity with the aim to evaluate whether a project is still active. Therefore, we are interested in finding out how much activity is still performed in inactive projects, since a strict separation is difficult to find, but important for potential users of the project.The results of three case studies show that Agent-based simulation is a promising approach for the prediction of software evolution and that many relations can be described this way. In particular, it turned out that a dynamic developer and project behavior is indispensable for the description of OSS evolution, because otherwise the representation of software processes is too static.During the work on this thesis, several people supported me in many ways. First, I would lik...

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Collaboration in open-source projects: myth or reality?

Cited by 13 publications

References 11 publications

Perceptions of open‐source software developers on collaborations: An interview and survey study

Perceptions of open‐source software developers on collaborations: An interview and survey study

Mining social collaboration patterns in developer social networks

Mining Developer Dynamics for Agent-Based Simulation of Software Evolution

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