Effort, co‐operation and co‐ordination in an open source software project: GNOME

Koch, Stefan; Schneider, Georg

doi:10.1046/j.1365-2575.2002.00110.x

Cited by 170 publications

(108 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Vasilescu et al [78] determined that the workload varies depending of the type of contributor. Koch and Schneider [39], and German [22] reported that the distribution of workload with respect to file touches is left-skewed, where few developers contribute most of code. Casebolt et al [11] compared authoring with respect to the file size, and suggested that large files are likely to be authored by one dominant contributor.…”

Section: Previous Studies Of Gnomementioning

confidence: 99%

“…We chose GNOME because it is a large and mature software ecosystem [49], it has been studied before [22,36,39,46,47,67,79], its official release is a single product comprised of many independent and distributed projects, and more important, it has a successful and stable release schedule: a new GNOME release is issued every six months. We studied the high level communication of the release management process across five releases.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Herding cats in a FOSS ecosystem: a tale of communication and coordination for release management

Poo-Caamaño

Knauss

Singer

et al. 2017

J Internet Serv Appl

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Release management in large-scale software development projects requires significant communication and coordination. It is particularly challenging in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystems, in which hundreds of loosely connected developers and their projects are coordinated to release software to a schedule. To better understand this process and its challenges, we analyzed over two and half years of communication in the GNOME ecosystem and studied developers' interactions. Through a case study, we cataloged communication channels, determined the main channel from which we categorized high level communication and coordination activities spanning five releases, and triangulated our results by interviewing ten key developers. We found that a release schedule, influence (instead of direct control), and diversity are the main factors that positively impact the release process in the GNOME ecosystem. We report a set of lessons learned that encapsulates our understanding of how the Release Management process function in a FOSS ecosystem, we learned that: (1) ensure that the release team follows the main communication channels used by developers, (2) provide a common place for coordination for an ecosystem, (3) consider including both good technical and social skills in a release team, (4) aim for a diverse release team, (5) based on lack of power, lobbying and consensus based management must be followed, (6) help the release team in the coordination process with a well defined schedule, and (7) release team work is different from regular software work. Our results can help organizations build better large-scale teams and show that research focused on individual projects might miss important parts of the picture.

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Section: Previous Studies Of Gnomementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Herding cats in a FOSS ecosystem: a tale of communication and coordination for release management

Poo-Caamaño

Knauss

Singer

et al. 2017

J Internet Serv Appl

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In this model, it is possible to differentiate among core developers (those who have a high involvement in the project), co-developers (with punctual, but frequent contributions), active users (that contribute only occasionally) and passive users [8,7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contributor Turnover in Libre Software Projects

Robles

González-Barahona

2006

IFIP International Federation for Information Processing

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Abstract.A common problem that management faces in software companies is the high instability of their staff. In libre (free, open source) software projects, the permanence of developers is also an open issue, with the potential of causing problems amplified by the self-organizing nature that most of them exhibit. Hence, human resources in libre software projects are even more difficult to manage: developers are in most cases not bound by a contract and, in addition, there is not a real management structure concerned about this problem. This raises some interesting questions with respect to the composition of development teams in libre software projects, and how they evolve over time. There are projects lead by their original founders (some sort of "code gods"), while others are driven by several different developer groups over time (i.e. the project "regenerates" itself). In this paper, we propose a quantitative methodology, based on the analysis of the activity in the source code management repositories, to study how these processes (developers leaving, developers joining) affect libre software projects. The basis of it is the analysis of the composition of the core group, the group of developers most active in a project, for several time lapses. We will apply this methodology to several large, well-known libre software projects, and show how it can be used to characterize them. In addition, we will discuss the lessons that can be learned, and the validity of our proposal.

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“…A noteworthy contribution in this sense, although not directly addressing the evolution of developer communities, is the onion model [5], which shows how developers and users are positioned in communities. This model differentiates among core developers (those who have a high involvement in the project), codevelopers (with specific but frequent contributions), active users (contributing only occasionally) and passive users [18,7,13].…”

Section: Related Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Social Network Analysis Techniques to Study Collaboration between a FLOSS Community and a Company

Martínez-Romo¹,

Robles

González-Barahona

et al. 2008

IFIP – The International Federation for Information Processing

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Abstract. Because of the sheer volume of information available in FLOSS repositories, simple analysis have to face the problems of filtering the relevant information. Hence, it is essential to apply methodologies that highlight that information for a given aspect of the project. In this paper, some techniques from the social sciences have been used on data from version control systems to extract information about the development process of FLOSS projects with the aim of highlighting several processes that occur in FLOSS projects and that are difficult to obtain by other means. In particular, the collaboration between the FLOSS community and a company has been studied by selecting two projects as case studies. The results highlight aspects such as efficiency in the development process, release management and leadership turnover.

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Effort, co‐operation and co‐ordination in an open source software project: GNOME

Cited by 170 publications

References 17 publications

Herding cats in a FOSS ecosystem: a tale of communication and coordination for release management

Herding cats in a FOSS ecosystem: a tale of communication and coordination for release management

Contributor Turnover in Libre Software Projects

Using Social Network Analysis Techniques to Study Collaboration between a FLOSS Community and a Company

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