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Measuring OSS quality trough centrality

Published: 13 May 2008 Publication History

Abstract

In this study, we explore whether the degree of centrality, betweenness and density of the open source software or OSS team communications network have any bearing on the quality of the software developed. We measure the quality of OSS in terms of number of defect fixed per software promotion, the number of defects reported at different severity levels and the average number of days for a defect to be fixed for each project team. The data required to conduct the analysis needs to be of OSS projects, their team structure and also contribution of the projects user community and immediate development team. We extract the communications pattern of OSS projects development teams from online forums or message boards as the developers are usually located in different geographic areas. We use SorceForge.net for collecting relevant coordination related data for this study; which is the central resource for hosting more than 100,000 open source development projects and with over 1 million registered users that participate in the development of high profile OSS projects. The outcome of this study suggests that there is a correlation between social network characteristics and strong and poor performing projects in an OSS environment.

References

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Crowston, K. and J. Howison (2006). "Hierarchy and centralization in free and open source software team communication." Knowledge, Techology and Policy 18(4): 65--85 {Retrieved on 9/7/07}.
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Dinh-Trong, T. and J. M. Bieman (2004). "Open Source software development: A case study of FreeBSD." 10th International Symposium on software metrics: 96--105 {Retrieved on 12/7/07}.
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Newman, M. E. J. (2005). "A measure of betweenness centrality based on random walks." Social Networks 27(1): 39--54 {Retrieved on 14/7/07}.
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Pearce, J. A. and F. R. David (1983). "A Social Network Approach to Organisational Design-Performance." The Academy of Management Review 8(3): 436--444 {Retrieved on 7/7/07}.
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Scott, J. (2000). "Social Network Analysis: A handbook." {Retrieved on 9/7/07}.
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Souza, C. d., J. Froehlich, et al. (2005). "Seeking the Source: Software Source Code as a Social and Technical Artifact." ACM Press: 197--206 {Retrieved on 11/7/07}.
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Ye, Y. and K. Kishida (2003). "Towards an understanding of the motivation Open Source Software developers." International Conference on Software Engineering: 419--429 {Retrieved on 8/7/07}.

Cited By

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  • (2009)How developer communication frequency relates to bug introducing changesProceedings of the joint international and annual ERCIM workshops on Principles of software evolution (IWPSE) and software evolution (Evol) workshops10.1145/1595808.1595835(153-158)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2009

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHASE '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering
May 2008
120 pages
ISBN:9781605580395
DOI:10.1145/1370114
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 May 2008

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Author Tags

  1. coordination
  2. distributed teams
  3. open source software
  4. social networks

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ICSE '08
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CHASE '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 34 submissions, 82%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 70 submissions, 67%

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  • (2009)How developer communication frequency relates to bug introducing changesProceedings of the joint international and annual ERCIM workshops on Principles of software evolution (IWPSE) and software evolution (Evol) workshops10.1145/1595808.1595835(153-158)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2009

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