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

Abstract

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.

Insights on the large-scale deployment of a curated Web-of-Trust: the Debian project’s cryptographic keyring

“…Finally, the methodology followed for this study could be applied to other free software projects, aiming to correlate with events and trends spanning a wider population than Debian's; the applicability of our work to other projects, however, depends on having a proper data set to base the work off. As mentioned in Section 2.3, we are aware of only one large project interested in formally structuring a Curated Web-of-Trust keyring, but other data sets could be taken as inputs -several authors have performed studies based on the pattern of discussions in mailing lists [40]; most of the analysis we presented here is based on the observation of seven years of history, so it will take a long time before this can be applied over other data sets.…”

Managing to release early, often and on time in the OpenStack software ecosystem

“…Given the scarcity of theoretical and empirical knowledge addressing release management in open source software [5,10], we explored and narrate the evolution of release management in practice. Our rich narrative on how OpenStack implemented a six-month, time-based release cycle with frequent development milestones can increase our ability to understand and explain release management within the context of complex open source software ecosystems.…”

“…Across disciplines, release management is acknowledged to be a very complex process that raises many issues among the producers and users of software [6][7][8][9]. However, there are very few empirical studies addressing release management in open source software development [5,10]. This is unfortunate since many lessons can be learned from open source software communities [11][12][13] because they allow studying the socio-technical aspects of software development freely whilst the proprietary model allows access only to a few scholars.…”

“…Given this scarcity of empirical work on release management in the context of open source software [5,10], we address how a particularly large, complex and highly networked open source software ecosystem implemented and refined a time-based release strategy. Taking the case of OpenStack, a fast growing cloud computing platform that is increasingly attracting scholarly attention (e.g., [14][15][16][17][18]), we explore how a time-based release management strategy was implemented in practice by looking at the overall release management process per se as well as the infrastructural tools that support it.…”

Free and open source software development: the end of the teenage years

“…Social relationships become more complicated when it is necessary to orchestrate the efforts to communicate and coordinate effectively throughout an ecosystem of interrelated software products to achieve a specific goal. In the paper "Herding cats in a FOSS ecosystem: a tale of communication and coordination for release management" [57], Germán Poo-Camaño and his colleagues conducted a case study to better understand how communication and coordination take place in release management of the GNOME ecosystem. They quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed two and a half years of projects' mailing lists and interviewed developers.…”