M. M. Mahbubul Syeed

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.

Open Source Prediction Methods: A Systematic Literature Review

For the adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) components, knowledge of the project development and associated risks with their use is needed. That, in turn, calls for reliable prediction models to support preventive maintenance and building quality software. In this paper, we perform a systematic literature review on the state-of-the-art on predicting OSS projects considering both code and community dimension. We also distill future direction for research in this field.

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.

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.

Socio-technical Congruence in OSS Projects: Exploring Conway’s Law in FreeBSD

Software development requires effective communication, coordination and collaboration among developers working on interdependent modules of the same project. The need for coordination is even more evident in open source projects where development is often more dispersed and distributed. In this paper, we study the match between the coordination needs established by the technical domain (i.e. source code) and the actual coordination activities carried out by the development team, such hypothetical match is also known as socio-technical congruence. We carry out our study by empirically examining Conway’s law in FreeBSD project. Our study shows that the congruence measure is significantly high in FreeBSD and that the congruence value remains stable as the project matured.

Binoculars: Comprehending Open Source Projects through Graphs

Comprehending Open Source Software (OSS) projects requires dealing with huge historical information stored in heterogeneous repositories, such as source code versioning systems, bug tracking system, mailing lists, and revision history logs. In this paper, we present Binoculars, a prototype tool which aims to provide a platform for graph based visualization and exploration of OSS projects. We describe the issues need to be addressed for the design and implementation of a graph based tool and distill lessons learned for future guideline.

Tool Assisted Analysis of Open Source Projects: A Multi-Faceted Challenge

Open Source Software OSS is currently a widely adopted approach to developing and distributing software. OSS code adoption requires an understanding of the structure of the code base. For a deeper understanding of the maintenance, bug fixing and development activities, the structure of the developer community also needs to be understood, especially the relations between the code and community structures. This, in turn, is essential for the development and maintenance of software containing OSS code. This paper proposes a method and support tool for exploring the relations of the code base and community structures of OSS projects. The method and proposed tool, Binoculars, rely on generic and reusable query operations, formal definitions of which are given in the paper. The authors demonstrate the applicability of Binoculars with two examples. The authors analyze a well-known and active open source project, FFMpeg, and the open source version of the IaaS cloud computing project Eucalyptus.

Prediction Models and Techniques for Open Source Software Projects: A Systematic Literature Review

Open Source Software OSS is currently a widely adopted approach to developing and distributing software. For effective adoption of OSS, fundamental knowledge of project development is needed. This often calls for reliable prediction models to simulate project evolution and to envision project future. These models provide help in supporting preventive maintenance and building quality software. This paper reports on a systematic literature survey aimed at the identification and structuring of research that offer prediction models and techniques in analyzing OSS projects. In this review, we systematically selected and reviewed 52 peer reviewed articles that were published between January, 2000 and March, 2013. The study outcome provides insight in what constitutes the main contributions of the field, identifies gaps and opportunities, and distills several important future research directions.

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

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 projects 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.