On the fulfillment of coordination requirements in open-source software projects: An exploratory study

Hunsen, Claus; Siegmund, Janet; Apel, Sven

doi:10.1007/s10664-020-09833-8

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 86 publications

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“…Next, "global software development" (GSD) has been a hot area of focus for researchers (from 2001 to 2018). The analysis of literature, such as [9,13,16,19,50,51,54,61,[82][83][84][85][86][87], also supports this finding.…”

Section: Network Of Keyword Co-occurrencesupporting

confidence: 67%

Socio-Technical Congruence as an Emerging Concept in Software Development: A Scientometric Analysis and Critical Literature Review

et al. 2021

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Ample evidence in the literature emphasizes using socio-technical congruence (STC) to address coordination issues in distributed software development. The recent decades have shown a progressive growth in STC, resulting in an increasing number of research studies in the scientific corpora. However, no existing study has systematically analyzed and illustrated the research patterns, latest trends, and evolution in STC. This study aims to explore the knowledge structure and create evolutionary trajectories from STC publications. To achieve this aim, a scientometric analysis is performed that combined a critical literature review (CLR) of STC-related published research in the Web of Science and Scopus databases from 2000 to 2020.The scientometric analysis is conducted through four scientometric techniques: i) coword network analysis, ii) co-author network analysis, iii) co-citation analysis, and iv) document clustering with timeline analysis. The study outcomes will help understand and visualize STC's research status quo. CLR is objectively conducted to recognize the latest research topics, themes, and salient features of STC research in software development. A total of 306 bibliographic data are analyzed to generate study-related networks and density visualizations. The results reveal an evolution in the STC field from its conception to the recent developments of STC models and other related factors. This study primarily contributes to the literature by providing a systematic view related to STC research to assist software practitioners in identifying applications and key research areas. Moreover, the combination of scientometric analysis and CLR reveals key researchers, journals and conferences, institutions, prominent contributing countries, and six major research themes, including "community structure" and "socio-technical congruence" as the most prominent ones.

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Section: Network Of Keyword Co-occurrencesupporting

confidence: 67%

Socio-Technical Congruence as an Emerging Concept in Software Development: A Scientometric Analysis and Critical Literature Review

et al. 2021

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“…That is, Cppstats identifies code blocks which are surrounded by preprocessor directives belonging to the feature which is named in the surrounding preprocessor directives. Cppstats is regularly used for locating features (Hunsen et al 2016(Hunsen et al , 2020Berger and Guo 2013;Feigenspan et al 2013) and has been extended in various ways (Fenske et al 2005;Schulze and Fenske 2018;Medeiros et al 2015). Using CodEfaCE, we are able to extract meta-data of all commits of a software project, as has been demonstrated in prior studies (Joblin et al 2015(Joblin et al , 2017a.…”

Section: Data Extractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The results of our study rely on the performance and correctness of CodEfaCE as we extract all the commit and e-mail data using this tool. For the extraction of feature code, CodEfaCE relies in turn on Cppstats, which has already been used to extract feature code in other empirical studies (Liebig et al 2010;Hunsen et al 2016Hunsen et al , 2020Berger and Guo 2013;Fenske et al 2005;Schulze and Fenske 2018;Feigenspan et al 2013;Medeiros et al 2015). Even if preprocessor annotations are not used the same way in different projects, preprocessor annotations are a well-established means to denote feature-specific code.…”

Section: Internal Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The restriction to preprocessor annotations as means for locating feature-specific code may threaten external validity, as they are mostly specific to C. Preprocessor annotations are well-established in OSS to implement features (e.g., Ernst et al 2002;Liebig et al 2010;Apel et al 2013;Hunsen et al 2016Hunsen et al , 2020, but the findings may vary in detail for other feature implementation techniques, though not the big picture.…”

Section: External Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The information a feature usually conveys is richer and more closely mirrors a developer's mental model of the software than files. For that reason and also due to the fact that the concept of features is apparently used by developers (Berger et al 2015;Queiroz et al 2017;Hunsen et al 2016Hunsen et al , 2020, our overarching research question is whether there is a difference in developers' collaboration and coordination on features and files. Technically, the code belonging to a feature may be scattered across several files and several features may be tangled within a file (Apel et al 2013), which needs to be taken into account when developers coordinate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Synchronous development in open-source projects: A higher-level perspective

et al. 2021

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Mailing lists are a major communication channel for supporting developer coordination in open-source software projects. In a recent study, researchers explored temporal relationships (e.g., synchronization) between developer activities on source code and on the mailing list, relying on simple heuristics of developer collaboration (e.g., co-editing files) and developer communication (e.g., sending e-mails to the mailing list). We propose two methods for studying synchronization between collaboration and communication activities from a higher-level perspective, which captures the complex activities and views of developers more precisely than the rather technical perspective of previous work. On the one hand, we explore developer collaboration at the level of features (not files), which are higher-level concepts of the domain and not mere technical artifacts. On the other hand, we lift the view of developer communication from a message-based model, which treats each e-mail individually, to a conversation-based model, which is semantically richer due to grouping e-mails that represent conceptually related discussions. By means of an empirical study, we investigate whether the different abstraction levels affect the observed relationship between commit activity and e-mail communication using state-of-the-art time-series analysis. For this purpose, we analyze a combined history of 40 years of data for three highly active and widely deployed open-source projects: QEMU, BusyBox, and OpenSSL. Overall, we found evidence that a higher-level view on the coordination of developers leads to identifying a stronger statistical dependence between the technical activities of developers than a less abstract and rather technical view.

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Social-technical network effects in open source software communities: understanding the impacts of dependency networks on project success

Huang

Wang

2022

ITP

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Purpose To better understand the success of an open source software (OSS) project, this study aims to examine the role of social dependency networks (i.e. social and technical dependencies) in online communities.Design/methodology/approach This study focuses on dependencies using three network metrics – degree centrality, betweenness centrality and closeness centrality – in developer and module networks. A longitudinal analysis from the projects hosted at Sourceforge.net is conducted to examine the effects of social and technical networks on the success of OSS projects. To address our research questions, we have constructed research models to investigate the social network effects in developer networks, the technical network effects in module networks, and the social-technical network effects in both types of networks.Findings The results reveal nonlinear relationships between degree centrality in both social and technical networks and OSS success, highlighting the importance of a moderate level of degree centrality in team structure and software architecture. Meanwhile, a moderate level of betweenness centrality and a lower level of closeness centrality between developers lead to a higher chance of OSS project success.Originality/value This study is the first attempt to consider the network metrics in both module networks of the technical sub-system and developer networks of the social sub-system to better understand their influences on project success.

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On the fulfillment of coordination requirements in open-source software projects: An exploratory study

Cited by 7 publications

References 86 publications

Socio-Technical Congruence as an Emerging Concept in Software Development: A Scientometric Analysis and Critical Literature Review

Socio-Technical Congruence as an Emerging Concept in Software Development: A Scientometric Analysis and Critical Literature Review

Synchronous development in open-source projects: A higher-level perspective

Social-technical network effects in open source software communities: understanding the impacts of dependency networks on project success

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