Economics and Information Theory

Survival Analysis: Techniques for Censored and Truncated Data (2nd ed.) (Book)

http://romisatriawahono.net/lecture/rm/survey/software%20engineering/Software%20Maintenance%20and%20Evolution/Manikas%20-%20Software%20ecosystems%20-%202013.pdf

Software ecosystems - A systematic literature review

Software development is usually a collaborative venture. Open Source Software (OSS) projects are no exception; indeed, by design, the OSS approach can accommodate teams that are more open, geographically distributed, and dynamic than commercial teams. This, we find, leads to OSS teams that are quite diverse. Team diversity, predominantly in offline groups, is known to correlate with team output, mostly with positive effects. How about in OSS? Using GitHub, the largest publicly available collection of OSS projects, we studied how gender and tenure diversity relate to team productivity and turnover. Using regression modeling of GitHub data and the results of a survey, we show that both gender and tenure diversity are positive and significant predictors of productivity, together explaining a sizable fraction of the data variability. These results can inform decision making on all levels, leading to better outcomes in recruiting and performance.

/pdf/gender-and-tenure-diversity-in-github-teams-369780aug7.pdf

Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams

Stack Overflow is a popular on-line programming question and answer community providing its participants with rapid access to knowledge and expertise of their peers, especially benefitting coders Despite the popularity of Stack Overflow, its role in the work cycle of open-source developers is yet to be understood: on the one hand, participation in it has the potential to increase the knowledge of individual developers thus improving and speeding up the development process On the other hand, participation in Stack Overflow may interrupt the regular working rhythm of the developer, hence also possibly slow down the development process In this paper we investigate the interplay between Stack Overflow activities and the development process, reflected by code changes committed to the largest social coding repository, GitHub Our study shows that active GitHub committers ask fewer questions and provide more answers than others Moreover, we observe that active Stack Overflow askers distribute their work in a less uniform way than developers that do not ask questions Finally, we show that despite the interruptions incurred, the Stack Overflow activity rate correlates with the code changing activity in GitHub

/pdf/stackoverflow-and-github-associations-between-software-55reylcbbj.pdf

StackOverflow and GitHub: Associations between Software Development and Crowdsourced Knowledge

Most empirical studies of open source software repositories focus on the analysis of isolated projects, or restrict themselves to the study of the relationships between technical artifacts. In contrast, we have carried out a case study that focuses on the actual contributors to software ecosystems, being collections of software projects that are maintained by the same community. To this aim, we defined a new series of workload and involvement metrics, as well as a novel approach-- $\widetilde{\mathbf{T}}$ -graphs--for reporting the results of comparing multiple distributions. We used these techniques to statistically study how workload and involvement of ecosystem contributors varies across projects and across activity types, and we explored to which extent projects and contributors specialise in particular activity types. Using Gnome as a case study we observed that, next to coding, the activities of localization, development documentation and building are prevalent throughout the ecosystem. We also observed notable differences between frequent and occasional contributors in terms of the activity types they are involved in and the number of projects they contribute to. Occasional contributors and contributors that are involved in many different projects tend to be more involved in the localization activity, while frequent contributors tend to be more involved in the coding activity in a limited number of projects.

/pdf/on-the-variation-and-specialisation-of-workload-a-case-study-1srny9cvzv.pdf

On the variation and specialisation of workload--A case study of the Gnome ecosystem community

A comparison of identity merge algorithms for software repositories

Nowadays, most empirical studies in open source software evolution are based on the analysis of program code alone. In order to get a better understanding of how software evolves over time, many more entities that are part of the software ecosystem need to be taken into account. We present a general framework to automate the analysis of the evolution of software ecosystems. The framework incorporates a database that stores all relevant information obtained thanks to several mining tools, and provides a unified data source to visualisation tools. One such visualisation tool is integrated in order to get a first quick overview of the evolution of different aspects of the software project under study. The framework is extensible in order to accommodate more and different types of input and output, depending on the needs of the user. We compare our framework against existing solutions, and show how we can use this framework for carrying out concrete ecosystem evolution experiments.

A framework for analysing and visualising open source software ecosystems

Empirical software engineering is concerned with statistical studies that aim to understand and improve certain aspects of the soft- ware development process. Many of these focus on the evolution and maintenance of evolving software projects. They rely on repository min- ing techniques to extract relevant data from software repositories or other data sources frequently used by software developers. We enlarge these empirical studies by exploring social software engineering, study- ing the developer community, including the way developers work, coop- erate, communicate and share information. The underlying hypothesis is that social aspects signicantly inuence the way in which the software project will evolve over time. We present some preliminary results of an empirical study we are carrying out on the dierent types of activities of the community involved in the GNOME open source ecosystem, and we discuss suggestions for future work.

/pdf/analysing-the-evolution-of-social-aspects-of-open-source-5g16qn8kmq.pdf

Analysing the evolution of social aspects of open source software ecosystems

Many software projects rely on a relational database in order to realize part of their functionality. Various database frameworks and object-relational mappings have been developed and used to facilitate data manipulation. Little is known about whether and how such frameworks co-occur, how they complement or compete with each other, and how this changes over time. We empirically studied these aspects for 5 Java database frameworks, based on a corpus of 3,707 GitHub Java projects. In particular, we analysed whether certain database frameworks co-occur frequently, and whether some database frameworks get replaced over time by others. Using the statistical technique of survival analysis, we explored the survival of the database frameworks in the considered projects. This provides useful evidence to software developers about which frameworks can be used successfully in combination and which combinations should be avoided.

/pdf/towards-a-survival-analysis-of-database-framework-usage-in-1kivab7lms.pdf

Mathieu Goeminne

Papers

On the variation and specialisation of workload--A case study of the Gnome ecosystem community

A comparison of identity merge algorithms for software repositories

A framework for analysing and visualising open source software ecosystems

Analysing the evolution of social aspects of open source software ecosystems

Towards a survival analysis of database framework usage in Java projects