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Exploring Socio-Technical Dependencies in Open Source Software Projects: Towards an Automated Data-driven Approach

Published: 01 October 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Comprehension of Open Source Software (OSS) projects is traditionally driven by the plethora of data produced and maintained by these projects. The data, in one hand, encapsulates the tacit knowledge on the evolution of the software itself. And, on the other hand, provides the history of communication and collaboration of the community. Acquisition and analysis of such data has been mostly manual or semi-automated and error-prone, mainly due to unstructured and substandard data representation. This increases the validity threat of the reported results and makes it incomparable across the studies. With the advancement of data management tools and technologies, many third party data providers are putting serious effort to provide OSS project's data in a standard and platform independent format. In this paper, we propose a framework to fully automate the analysis and visualization of OSS evolution data through the use of existing data services. As a proof of concept we implemented a tool named POMAZ. We demonstrate the applicability of the tool in the context of two related open source projects FFmpeg and GStreamer.

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Elliot Jaffe

This paper discusses the collection and analysis of software development and sociological metrics related to open-source development. Open-source development often involves hundreds of participants who do not share a working environment or management chain. Participants work for free, contributing their own time and effort toward the project's goals. This paper suggests an architecture that combines data collection and analysis to enable analysis of the ways the projects and participants interact and develop a software base. The authors describe specific tools that they have built and relate research results based on those tools. The sample data presented relates to the number of lines of code contributed and present in the project and the number of contributors to those projects. The tool integrates this data with a visualization environment to compare code size and contributor size over time. The particular case studies serve as references to the value of the tools. Overall, this paper is of interest to those studying the sociological aspects of open-source development where communities of contributors change over time based on individual contributor preferences. Online Computing Reviews Service

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cover image ACM Other conferences
AcademicMindTrek '13: Proceedings of International Conference on Making Sense of Converging Media
October 2013
360 pages
ISBN:9781450319928
DOI:10.1145/2523429
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 October 2013

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Author Tags

  1. Data Analysis
  2. Open Source Software
  3. Socio-Technical Congruence

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