Imed Hammouda

From proprietary to open source-Growing an open source ecosystem

In todays business and software arena, Free/Libre/Open Source Software has emerged as a promising platform for software ecosystems. Following this trend, more and more companies are releasing their proprietary software as open source, forming a software ecosystem of related development projects complemented with a social ecosystem of community members. Since the trend is relatively recent, there are few guidelines on how to create and maintain a sustainable open source ecosystem for a proprietary software. This paper studies the problem of building open source communities for industrial software that was originally developed as closed source. Supporting processes, guidelines and best practices are discussed and illustrated through an industrial case study. The research is paving the road for new directions in growing a thriving open source ecosystem.

Teaching Agile: addressing the conflict between project delivery and application of Agile methods

This paper analyses the changes we have made in teaching agile methodologies, practices, and principles in four courses in order to address a specific dilemma: students need to apply agile methods in order to learn them, but when complementing our courses with applied content, we face the problem that students perceive the learning and application of agile methods as less important than delivering a finished product at the end of the course. This causes students to not apply theoretical process knowledge and therefore to not develop necessary skills associated with working with defined processes in the industry. Concretely, we report on our experience with teaching Scrum with Lego, removing formal grading requirements on the delivered product, emphasising process application in post-mortem reports, and organisational changes to support the process during supervision. These changes are analysed in the context of student satisfaction, teacher observations, and achievements of learning outcomes. We also provide an overview of the lessons learnt to help guide the design of courses on agile methodologies.

Open Source Systems: Long-Term Sustainability : Proceedings of the 8th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference, OSS 2012. Hammamet, Tunisia, September 2012

Open Source Systems: Long-Term Sustainability : Proceedings of the 8th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference, OSS 2012. Hammamet, Tunisia, September 2012

EAM: Ecosystemability assessment method

In this extended abstract, we present the ecosystemability assessment method as a means to assess the extent to which a software system, represented by its architecture and its development environment, supports the vision of ecosystem.

Socio-Technical Congruence in the Ruby Ecosystem

Existing studies show that open source projects may enjoy high levels of socio-technical congruence despite their open and distributed character. Such observations are yet to be confirmed in the case of larger open source ecosystems in which developers contribute to different projects within the ecosystem. In this paper, we empirically study the relationships between the developer coordination activities and the project dependency structure in the Ruby ecosystem. Our motivation is to verify whether the ecosystem context maintains the high socio-technical congruence levels observed in many smaller scale FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) projects. Our study results show that the collaboration pattern among the developers in Ruby ecosystem is not necessarily shaped by the communication needs indicated by the dependencies among the ecosystem projects.

Pluggable Systems as Architectural Pattern: An Ecosystemability Perspective

In this paper we review the use of plug-in architectures as a technological platform for software ecosystems. Our observation is that the software community has viewed and used plug-ins as powerful extension mechanisms offering a wide range of quality properties. Looking beyond such low-level technical interpretation, we argue that pluggable systems should be perceived and treated as a higher level architectural pattern. In order to back our perspective we present the pattern following widely adopted documentation scheme, we show example usage of the pattern in the Eclipse ecosystem, and we discuss different implementation options of the pattern when building new technical solutions for ecosystems.

Investigating Relationships Between FLOSS Foundations and FLOSS Projects

Foundations function as vital institutional support infrastructures for many of the most successful open source projects, but the role of these support entities remains an understudied phenomenon in FLOSS research. Drawing on Open Hub (formerly known as Ohloh) data, this paper empirically investigates the different ways these entities support projects and interact with different projects and with each other.

Who Contributes to What? Exploring Hidden Relationships between FLOSS Projects

In this paper we address the challenge of tracking resembling open source projects by exploiting the information of which developers contribute to which projects. To do this, we have performed a social network study to analyze data collected from the Ohloh repository. Our findings suggest that the more shared contributors two projects have, the more likely they resemble with respect to properties such as project application domain, programming language used and project size.

Ensuring Architecture Conventions in Multi-site Development

In a multi-site software development setting, creational and validational activities can be distributed and carried out by separate teams. An example of such a distributed development setup is when a system implemented in site A needs to be validated in a remote site B with regard to the component interaction rules dictated by the system architecture. In the current software engineering practice, support has mainly focused on the software creation paying less attention to the needs of the validation phase, which however is becoming increasingly important due to global software engineering practices. This paper argues that systematic support should be provided to the software validation based on the assumptions used in the software creation using the example of component interactions. Furthermore, the paper presents validational tool support for such a systematic process applied to an industrial project. The findings and experiences of the case study are also reported.

Support mechanisms provided by FLOSS foundations and other entities

Foundations function as a vital institutional support infrastructure for many of the most successful open-source projects, but the different roles played by these support entities are understudied in Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) research. Drawing on Open Hub (formerly known as Ohloh) data, this paper empirically investigates how these entities support projects and interact with other projects. This study was conducted using the Theoretical Saturation Grounded Theory approach given the large volume of data on hand. The findings are synthesized as a taxonomy of support entities, a categorization of support mechanisms and a set of dynamics of the interactions between different FLOSS support entities.