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Proceedings ArticleDOI

A case study of open source software development: the Apache server

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TLDR
This analysis of the development process of the Apache web server reveals a unique process, which performs well on important measures, and concludes that hybrid forms of development that borrow the most effective techniques from both the OSS and commercial worlds may lead to high performance software processes.
Abstract
According to its proponents, open source style software development has the capacity to compete successfully, and perhaps in many cases displace, traditional commercial development methods. In order to begin investigating such claims, we examine the development process of a major open source application, the Apache web server. By using email archives of source code change history and problem reports we quantify aspects of developer participation, core team size, code ownership, productivity, defect density, and problem resolution interval for this OSS project. This analysis reveals a unique process, which performs well on important measures. We conclude that hybrid forms of development that borrow the most effective techniques from both the OSS and commercial worlds may lead to high performance software processes.

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Journal ArticleDOI

The Simple Economics of Open Source

TL;DR: The extent to which labor economics, especially the literature on career concerns,' can explain many of these projects' features is highlighted, and aspects of the future of open source development process remain somewhat difficult to predict with off-the-shelf economic models.
Journal ArticleDOI

How open source software works: “free” user-to-user assistance

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore how the mundane but necessary task of field support is organized in the case of Apache web server software, and why some project participants are motivated to provide this service gratis to others.
Journal Article

Agile software development methods: Review and analysis

TL;DR: This publication proposes a definition and a classification of agile software development approaches and analyses ten software development methods that can be characterized as being "agile" against the defined criterion.
Journal ArticleDOI

Understanding the Motivations, Participation, and Performance of Open Source Software Developers: A Longitudinal Study of the Apache Projects

TL;DR: A theoretical model relating the motivations, participation, and performance of OSS developers is developed and it is suggested that past-performance rankings enhance developers' subsequent status motivations.
Journal ArticleDOI

Why Open Source software can succeed

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss three key economic problems raised by the emergence of Open Source: motivation, co-ordination, and diffusion, and show that recent developments in the theory of diffusion of technologies with network externality may help to explain these phenomena.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

A field study of the software design process for large systems

TL;DR: A layered behavioral model is used to analyze how three of these problems—the thin spread of application domain knowledge, fluctuating and conflicting requirements, and communication bottlenecks and breakdowns—affected software productivity and quality through their impact on cognitive, social, and organizational processes.
Journal ArticleDOI

The cathedral and the bazaar

TL;DR: A sustained argument from the Linux experience is made for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," and productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents are suggested.
Journal ArticleDOI

A Methodology for Collecting Valid Software Engineering Data

TL;DR: An effective data collection method for evaluating software development methodologies and for studying the software development process is described and results show that data validation is a necessary part of change data collection.
Book

Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution

TL;DR: In this article, leaders of Open Source come together to discuss the new vision of the software industry they have created, through essays that explain how the movement works, why it succeeds, and where it is going.
Journal ArticleDOI

Software measurement: a necessary scientific basis

TL;DR: It is shown that the search for general software complexity measures is doomed to failure and the theory does help to define and validate measures of specific complexity attributes, and is able to view software measurement in a very wide perspective.
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