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Collaboration Practices and Affordances in Free/Open Source Software Development

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Collaborative Software Engineering

Abstract

This chapter examines collaborative work practices, development processes, project and community dynamics, and other socio-technical relationships in free and open source software development (FOSSD). It also describes what kinds of collaboration affordances facilitate collaborative work in FOSSD projects. It reviews a set of empirical studies of FOSSD that articulate different levels of analysis. Finally, there is discussion of limitations and constraints in understanding what collaboration practices and affordances arise in FOSSD studies and how they work, and then to emerging opportunities for future FOSSD studies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Description and examples of FOSS hackathons at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon.

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Acknowledgments

The research described in this chapter has been supported by grants #0534771 and #0808783 from the National Science Foundation; also grants from the Center for the Edge, and the Acquisition Research Program, at the Naval Postgraduate School. No endorsement implied. Contributors to this research include Chris Jensen, Margaret Elliott, John Noll, Mark Ackerman, and others at the Institute for Software Research at the University of California, Irvine.

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Correspondence to Walt Scacchi .

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Scacchi, W. (2010). Collaboration Practices and Affordances in Free/Open Source Software Development. In: Mistrík, I., Grundy, J., Hoek, A., Whitehead, J. (eds) Collaborative Software Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10294-3_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10294-3_15

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