On the relationship between design discussions and design quality: a case study of Apache projects

Mannan, Umme Ayda; Ahmed, Iftekhar; Jensen, Carlos; Sarma, Anita

doi:10.1145/3368089.3409707

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 52 publications

(85 reference statements)

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“…Mailing lists in OSS development have been investigated recently for traceability between emails and source code [5], communication in development using mailing lists [22], and information seeking through mailing lists [39]. For example, a recent study on 37 Apache projects shows that 89.51% of all design discussions occur in project mailing lists [62]. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies that investigate on the nature of architecture information communication using mailing lists.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Architecture information communication in two OSS projects: The why, who, when, and what

Ding

Liang

et al. 2021

Journal of Systems and Software

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Architecture information communication in two OSS projects: The why, who, when, and what

Ding

Liang

et al. 2021

Journal of Systems and Software

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“…Finally, Apache projects are often studied in scientific research, which allows our work to be placed in the context of existing research [39], [40], [41], [42], [43]. In fact, we used the list of projects from the dataset curated by Mannan et al [44]. Table 2 presents the statistics of the 37 projects in our dataset.…”

Section: Characterizing Implicit Mentoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit Mentoring: The Unacknowledged Developer Efforts in Open Source

Feng¹,

Chatterjee²,

Sarma³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Mentoring is traditionally viewed as a dyadic, top-down apprenticeship. This perspective, however, overlooks other forms of informal mentoring taking place in everyday activities in which developers invest time and effort, but remain unacknowledged. Here, we investigate the different flavors of mentoring in Open Source Software (OSS) to define and identify implicit mentoring. We first define implicit mentoring-situations where contributors guide others through instructions and suggestions embedded in everyday (OSS) activities-through formative interviews with OSS contributors, a literature review, and member-checking. Next, through an empirical investigation of Pull Requests (PRs) in 37 Apache Projects, we build a classifier to extract implicit mentoring and characterize it through the dual lenses of experience and gender. Our analysis of 107,895 PRs shows that implicit mentoring occurs (27.41% of all PRs include implicit mentoring) and it does not follow the traditional dyadic, top-down apprenticeship model. When considering the gender of mentor-mentee pairs, we found pervasive homophily-a preference to mentor those who are of the same gender-in 93.81% cases. In the cross-gender mentoring instances, women were more likely to mentor men.

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“…Code changes can implement bug fixes, refactorings, or further enhancement of the software. Developers often discuss and review code changes on the project's developer mailing list (Mannan et al 2020) and then someone else may merge the discussed changes into the main repository (Storey et al 2017). The VCS stores all code changes in the form of commits together with meta-data such as author information and modification timestamps.…”

Section: Co-commit Burstsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We dedicate attention to analyzing developer communication on mailing lists because they are historically rich and well-established sources of data for discussions regarding software architecture and reviewing of code changes (Rigby et al 2008;Ramsauer et al 2019). In a recent study on 37 OSS projects, Mannan et al 2020) have shown that about 89% of such discussions take place on the project's mailing list. Mailing lists are a greater source of longitudinal data than more recently introduced social-coding platforms (e.g., GitHUB), because their usage dates back more than 10 years (see Table 2).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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On the relationship between design discussions and design quality: a case study of Apache projects

Cited by 8 publications

References 52 publications

Architecture information communication in two OSS projects: The why, who, when, and what

Architecture information communication in two OSS projects: The why, who, when, and what

Implicit Mentoring: The Unacknowledged Developer Efforts in Open Source

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

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