Sulayman K. Sowe

Identifying knowledge brokers that yield software engineering knowledge in OSS projects

Much research on open source software development concentrates on developer lists and other software repositories to investigate what motivates professional software developers to participate in open source software projects. Little attention has been paid to individuals who spend valuable time in lists helping participants on some mundane yet vital project activities. Using three Debian lists as a case study we investigate the impact of knowledge brokers and their associated activities in open source projects. Social network analysis was used to visualize how participants are affiliated with the lists. The network topology reveals substantial community participation. The consequence of collaborating in mundane activities for the success of open source software projects is discussed. The direct beneficiaries of this research are in the identification of knowledge experts in open source software projects. � 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Using Repository of Repositories (RoRs) to Study the Growth of F/OSS Projects: A Meta-Analysis Research Approach

Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) repositories contain valuable data and their usefulness in studying software development and community activities continues to attract a lot of research attention. A trend in F/OSS studies is the use of metadata stored in a repository of repositories or RoRs. This paper utilizes data obtained from such RoRs -FLOSSmole- to study the types of projects being developed by the F/OSS community. We downloaded projects by topics data in five areas (Database, Internet, Software Development, Communications, and Games/Entertainment) from Flossmole’s raw and summary data of the sourceforge repository. Time series analysis show the numbers of projects in the five topics are growing linearly. Further analysis supports our hypothesis that F/OSS development is moving “up the stack” from developer tools and infrastructure support to end-user applications such as Databases. The findings have implications for the interpretation of the F/OSS landscape, the utilization and adoption of open source databases, and problems researchers might face in obtaining and using data from RoRs.

Emerging Free and Open Source Software Practices

Project infrastructure and software repositories are now widely available at low cost with easy extraction, providing a foundational base to conduct detailed cyber-archeology at a scale not open to researchers before. Emerging Free and Open Source Software Practices provides a collection of empirical research acting as a focal point to the status of these repositories and infrastructures along with the F/OSS project. Emerging Free and Open Source Software Practices presents a framework and state-of-the-art references on F/OSS projects, reporting on past and on-going case studies of projects covering a wide range of F/OSS applications and domains. This book postulates trends in the evolution of software practices and solutions to the challenges ubiquitous nature free and open source software provides.

A Framework for Teaching Software Testing using F/OSS Methodology

In this paper we discuss a framework for teaching software testing to undergraduate students’ volunteers. The framework uses open source software development methodology and was implemented in the “Introduction to Software Engineering” course at the department of Informatics, Aristotle University, Greece. The framework is in three phases, each describing a teaching and learning context in which students get involved in real software projects activities. We report on our teaching experiences, lessons learned and some practical problems we encountered. Results from preliminary evaluation shows that students did well as bug hunters in the bazaar and are willing to participate in their projects long after graduation.

Reflection on Knowledge Sharing in F/OSS Projects

Knowledge sharing between software project participants simplifies a range of decision-making processes and helps improve the way software is being developed, distributed, and supported. However, research in this area has traditionally been very difficult because the source of knowledge, the code, has been a guarded secret and software developers and users inhabit different worlds. F/OSS projects have changed the way we perceive and understand knowledge sharing in distributed software development. This short paper presents our current understanding, and what needs to be done in terms of empirical research in knowledge sharing in F/OSS projects.

Detecting similarities in antipattern ontologies using semantic social networks: Implications for software project management

Ontology has been recently proposed as an appropriate formalism to model software project management antipatterns, in order to encode antipatterns in a computer understandable form and introduce antipatterns to the Semantic Web. However, given two antipattern ontologies, the same entity can be described using different terminology. Therefore, the detection of similar antipattern ontologies is a difficult task. In this paper, we introduce a three-layered antipattern semantic social network, which involves the social network, the antipattern ontology network and the concept network. Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques can be used to assist software project managers in finding similar antipattern ontologies. For this purpose, SNA measures are extracted from one layer of the semantic social network to another and this knowledge is used to infer new links between antipattern ontologies. The level of uncertainty associated with each new link is represented using Bayesian Networks (BNs). Furthermore, BNs address the issue of quantifying the uncertainty of the data collected regarding antipattern ontologies for the purposes of the conducted analysis. Finally, BNs are used to augment SNA by taking into account meta-information in their calculations. Hence, other knowledge not included in the social network can be used in order to search the social network for further inference. The benefits of using an antipattern semantic social network are illustrated using an example community of software project management antipattern ontologies.

1st International Workshop on: ‘Designing for Participatory Learning’ Building from Open Source Success to Develop Free Ways to Share and Learn

The Open Source world shows how volunteer collaboration can lead to great products and to great learning. We want to further explore at this workshop what happens using approaches from that community to break barriers between teachers and learners for today’s Internet-savvy young people to design and co-construct sites for participatory learning. The aim of this workshop is to explore the barriers for this type of learning in higher education settings. Content creation, knowledge exchange, community dynamics, and the impact on the boundary between formal and informal education are key subjects of this workshop.

An empirical study of FOSS developers patterns of contribution: Challenges for data linkage and analysis

Abstract The majority of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developers are mobile and often use different identities in the projects or communities they participate in. These characteristics pose challenges for researchers studying the presence and contributions of developers across multiple repositories. In this paper, we present a methodology, employ various statistical measures, and leverage Bayesian networks to study the patterns of contribution of 502 developers in both Version Control System (VCS) and mailing list repositories in 20 GNOME projects. Our findings shows that only a small percentage of developers are contributing to both repositories and this cohort is making more commits than they are posting messages to mailing lists. The implications of these findings for understanding the patterns of contribution in FOSS projects and on the quality of the final product are discussed.