Abstract
We report on an exploratory study, which aims at understanding how software communities use blogs compared to conventional development infrastructures. We analyzed the behavior of 1,100 bloggers in four large open source communities, distinguishing between committing bloggers and other community members. We observed that these communities intensively use blogs with one new entry every 8 h. A blog entry includes 14 times more words than a commit message. When analyzing the content of the blogs, we found that committers and others bloggers write about similar topics. Most popular topics in committers’ blogs represent high-level concepts such as features and domain concepts, while source code related topics are discussed in 15% of their posts. Other community members frequently write about community events and conferences as well as configuration and deployment topics. We found that the blogging peak period is usually after the software is released. Moreover, committers are more likely to blog after corrective engineering than after forward engineering and re-engineering activities. Our findings call for a hypothesis-driven research to (a) further understand the role of social media in dissolving the collaboration boundaries between developers and other stakeholders and (b) integrate social media into development processes and tools.
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Notes
In an earlier version (Pagano and Maalej 2011) we reported a much smaller rate. After a manual analysis of 100 randomly selected blog posts, we discovered that the original scanning algorithm missed certain blocks. We are more confident with the results presented in this paper.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the FastFix project, which is funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission, grant agreement no. FP7-258109. We would like to thank Enrique Garcia Perez, Damir Ismailović, Amel Mahmuzić, Helmut Naughton, Tobias Roehm, Alex Waldmann, and the anonymous MSR’11 and EMSE reviewers for their valuable feedback. We are further thankful to Jonas Helming, Felix Kaser, and Daniel G. Siegel for helpful insights into the Eclipse and GNOME communities.
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Editors: Arie van Deursen, Tao Xie and Thomas Zimmermann
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Pagano, D., Maalej, W. How do open source communities blog?. Empir Software Eng 18, 1090–1124 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-012-9211-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-012-9211-2