Multicriteria Optimization of Software Development Platform Selection

Shared understandings are important for software development as they guide effective individual contributions and coordination of the software development process. However, it is not clear if such understandings can be developed in highly distributed groups that do not regularly meet face-to-face. In this paper, we present the results of a preliminary analysis of shared mental models within a Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development team. We analyzed mental models using cognitive mapping and process analysis and compared the models of four developers from the Apache Lucene Java project. Our analysis suggests that there is a high level of sharing among core developers but the sharing is not complete, with some differences related to tenure and role in the project. Finally, we suggest directions for further research on shared mental models in FLOSS teams.

We empirically examine the relationship between software design modularity and software quality in open source software (OSS) development projects. Conventional wisdom suggests that degree of software modularity affects software quality. An analysis of 203 software releases in 46 OSS projects hosted on SourceForge.net lends support for a more complex relationship between software modularity and software quality than conventional wisdom suggests. We find that software modularity is associated with reduced software complexity, an increased number of static software bugs, and a mixed relationship with the percentage of bugs closed. We do not find empirical evidence supporting any relationship between modularity and other measures of customer satisfaction. In addition to empirically testing the relationship between modularity and quality, we introduce new measures of software modularity and software quality. Implications are developed for the theory of modularity and the practice of software development.

In this paper, we identify a set of factors that may be used to forecast software productivity and software development time. Software productivity was measured in function points per person hours, and software development time was measured in number of elapsed days. Using field data on over 130 field software projects from various industries, we empirically test the impact of team size, integrated computer aided software engineering (ICASE) tools, software development type, software development platform, and programming language type on the software development productivity and development time. Our results indicate that team size, software development type, software development platform, and programming language type significantly impact software development productivity. However, only team size significantly impacts software development time. Our results indicate that effective management of software development teams, and using different management strategies for different software development type environments may improve software development productivity.

BackgroundInnovation through an open source model has proven to be successful for software development. This success has led many to speculate if open source can be applied to other industries with similar success. We attempt to provide an understanding of open source software development characteristics for researchers, business leaders and government officials who may be interested in utilizing open source innovation in other contexts and with an emphasis on drug discovery.MethodsA systematic review was performed by searching relevant, multidisciplinary databases to extract empirical research regarding the common characteristics and barriers of initiating and maintaining an open source software development project.ResultsCommon characteristics to open source software development pertinent to open source drug discovery were extracted. The characteristics were then grouped into the areas of participant attraction, management of volunteers, control mechanisms, legal framework and physical constraints. Lastly, their applicability to drug discovery was examined.ConclusionsWe believe that the open source model is viable for drug discovery, although it is unlikely that it will exactly follow the form used in software development. Hybrids will likely develop that suit the unique characteristics of drug discovery. We suggest potential motivations for organizations to join an open source drug discovery project. We also examine specific differences between software and medicines, specifically how the need for laboratories and physical goods will impact the model as well as the effect of patents.

Interest of scientific research on Open Source software and its development process is frequent. The number of articles available and the number of tracks or workshops on this topic in most relevant IS Conferences is high. The usability of Open Source Software has been scarcely considered until few years ago, probably due to the particular role that the user has in such a development environment. In Open Source software development, users and developers are not so different. Anyhow, the diffusion of the Open Source software outside the development community contributes to sharpen the distinction among these two groups that are no longer equivalent. This circumstance has contributed to increase the interest on usability of Open Source software. Nevertheless, studies on end-users in Open Source contexts are still young. This paper introduces a pilot study on end user's perception of Open Source software. The aim of this pilot study is to identify how the end user perceives the Open Source software (in terms of Usability, Functionality, Reliability, Efficiency and Quality in Use).

Usability is an important quality characteristic of software products and information systems. Different approaches for introducing usability activities into open source software (OSS) development have not yet been fully evaluated. This paper experiments with the introduction of usability activities into OSS development through a participative approach. An empirical case study was carried out in a game development OSS project. The results of this study suggest that it is beneficial to introduce usability activities into OSS development through the participative approach. In the participative approach the usability experts become recognized part of the development community through adapting their ways of work into the culture of the OSS project and submitting code patches. This participative approach had a clear impact in the case project as seen in changes in the user interface and in improved usability. The challenge of adapting usability and OSS development philosophies and practices should, however, be researched further.

In stark contrast with the fully participative “bazaar” imagery of open source software (OSS) development, some recent empirical research has pointed out that much of the OSS development is carried out by a small percentage of developers. This raises serious concerns that concentration of development effort on a few will limit knowledge sharing and underutilize the available resources. Using the notion of strategic interaction, this paper argues that individual developers often interact strategically with other highly resourceful developers by forming a smaller but better organized structure to intensify the types of epistemic interactions that matter most to the OSS development. A general framework of strategic interaction including participation inequality, conversational interactivity, and cross-thread connectivity is proposed to examine its impact on knowledge sharing, and validated using 128 discussion threads from the K Desktop Environment (KDE) developer mailing list. The findings indicate that strategic interaction has expanded knowledge sharing but with the caveat that extreme concentration of development could have an opposite effect. For researchers, this study dovetails the incentive logic by proposing and validating the strategic aspects of OSS participation to better understand the collective dynamics underpinning OSS development. Practitioners can use this approach to evaluate and better support existing knowledge-sharing initiatives.

In open source software development, a major challenge is the prioritization of new requirements as well as the identification of responsible developers for their implementation. Unlike conventional industrial software development, where requirements engineers have to explicitly define who implements what, in the context of open source development, developers (contributors) usually decide on their own which requirements to implement next. Contributors have to deal with a huge number of requirements where the recognition of the most relevant ones often becomes a crucial task with a high impact on the success of a software project. This fact defines our major motivation for the development of a prioritization tool for the ECLIPSE community which recommends relevant requirements (issues/bugs) to open source developers. Our tool uses real-world data from ECLIPSE in order to build a prediction model. We trained and tested our tool with different classifiers such as Naive Bayes (representing our baseline), Decision Tree, and Random Forest. The evaluation results indicate that the Random Forest classifier correctly predicts issues with a precision of 0.88 (F1-score 0.68).CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Recommender systems; • Humancentered computing → Open source software; • Computing methodologies → Machine learning approaches; Natural language processing; • Software and its engineering → Requirements analysis.

Open source software is becoming increasingly prominent, and the economic structure of open-source development is changing. In recent years, firms motivated by revenues from software services markets have become the primary contributors to open-source development. In this paper we study the role of services in open source software development and explore the choice between open source and proprietary software. Specifically, our economic model jointly analyzes the investment and pricing decisions of the originators of software and of subsequent open-source contributors. We find that if a contributor is efficient in software development, the originator should adopt an open-source strategy, allowing the contributor to offer higher total quality and capture the higher end of the market while the originator focuses on providing software services to lower end consumers. Conversely, if the contributor is not efficient in development, the originator should adopt a proprietary software development strategy, gaining revenue from software sales and squeezing the contributor out of the services market. In certain cases an increase in originator development efficiency can result in increased contributor profits. Finally, we find that, somewhat counterintuitively, an increase in contributor development efficiency can reduce overall social welfare.

By reviewing the history of the open-source movement and highlighting recent research on its unique developmental processes, the author suggests that there are general lessons for anyone seeking to encourage innovation in any field or industry. What incentives, for instance, spark these Internet-based communities of software developers to innovate voluntarily outside the company's boundaries without formal work agreements? Research shows that open-source software developers freely reveal and share information because they garner personal benefits, such as reputation enhancement, expertise refinement and, quite simply, enjoyment. Researchers also note that, since most of these benefits are contingent upon membership in well-functioning developer enclaves, a sense of community is important to the open-source phenomenon. For example, identification with the highly esteemed Linux operating-system project instills a sense of responsibility and loyalty among contributors, who are motivated by their perceived indispensability to the team. Researchers point out, however, that developers also are motivated by a pragmatic desire to customize software. Much of the referenced research explores the unusual nature of open-source licensing agreements and intellectual-property protection. That is, open-source licenses guarantee the rights not of developers, but of future users against appropriation, and developers guard their work zealously with online sanctioning, brands and logos. Noting that the products emanating from open-source projects are often commercially attractive and widely used in business and government (for example, at IBM, NASA, Sun Microsystems, the German government), the author concludes by discussing the implications for future business activities.

Responding to the fact that software systems become more and more complex and mutable, not only the software-standards-related technologies should be adopted, but the environments for software development and evolution should also be flexible and integratable. These facts make software development and maintenance difficult and costly. In this chapter, we first illustrate the activities and studies for software standards, processes, CASE toolsets, and environments. Then, we propose a process and an environment for evolution-oriented software development, called the PRocess and Agent-based Integrated Software development Environment (PRAISE). PRAISE advocates software development with popular software methodologies, and it uses an XML-based mechanism to unify the various paradigms with different standards. It integrates processes, roles, toolsets, and work products to make software development more efficient. With PRAISE, users are encouraged to adopt familiar mechanisms and formal approaches as they wish. PRAISE maintains the consistency of the paradigms so that users do not need to worry about conflicts with other paradigms that are built in or added later. PRAISE meets the need for evolving software development and maintenance.

Responding to the fact that software systems become more and more complex and mutable, not only the software-standards-related technologies should be adopted, but the environments for software development and evolution should also be flexible and integratable. These facts make software development and maintenance difficult and costly. In this chapter, we first illustrate the activities and studies for software standards, processes, CASE toolsets, and environments. Then, we propose a process and an environment for evolution-oriented software development, called the PRocess and Agent-based Integrated Software development Environment (PRAISE). PRAISE advocates software development with popular software methodologies, and it uses an XML-based mechanism to unify the various paradigms with different standards. It integrates processes, roles, toolsets, and work products to make software development more efficient. With PRAISE, users are encouraged to adopt familiar mechanisms and formal approaches as they wish. PRAISE maintains the consistency of the paradigms so that users do not need to worry about conflicts with other paradigms that are built in or added later. PRAISE meets the need for evolving software development and maintenance.

This paper outlines a critical, textual approach for the analysis of the relationship between different actors in information technology (IT) production, and further concretizes the approach in the analysis of the role of users in the open source software (OSS) development literature. Central concepts of the approach are outlined. The role of users is conceptualized as reader involvement aiming to contribute to the configuration of the reader (to how users and the parameters for their work practices are defined in OSS texts). Afterwards, OSS literature addressing reader involvement is critically reviewed. In OSS context, the OSS writers as readers configure the reader and other readers are assumed to be capable of and interested in commenting the texts. A lack of OSS research on non-technical reader involvement is identified. Furthermore, not only are the OSS readers configured, but so are OSS writers. In OSS context while writers may be empowered, this clearly does not apply to the non-technical OSS readers. Implication for research and practice are discussed.

Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and PracticeVolume 16, Issue 6 p. 363-365 Issue OverviewFree Access Analyzing the Evolution of Large-Scale Software Tom Mens, Tom MensSearch for more papers by this authorJuan F. Ramil, Juan F. RamilSearch for more papers by this authorMichael W. Godfrey, Michael W. GodfreySearch for more papers by this author Tom Mens, Tom MensSearch for more papers by this authorJuan F. Ramil, Juan F. RamilSearch for more papers by this authorMichael W. Godfrey, Michael W. GodfreySearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 November 2004 https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.300Citations: 8AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume16, Issue6Special Issue: Analyzing the Evolution of Large‐Scale SoftwareNovember/December 2004Pages 363-365 RelatedInformation

Proponents of open source style software development claim that better software is produced using this model compared with the traditional closed model. However, there is little empirical evidence in support of these claims. In this paper, we present the results of a pilot case study aiming: (a) to understand the implications of structural quality; and (b) to figure out the benefits of structural quality analysis of the code delivered by open source style development. To this end, we have measured quality characteristics of 100 applications written for Linux, using a software measurement tool, and compared the results with the industrial standard that is proposed by the tool. Another target of this case study was to investigate the issue of modularity in open source as this characteristic is being considered crucial by the proponents of open source for this type of software development. We have empirically assessed the relationship between the size of the application components and the delivered quality measured through user satisfaction. We have determined that, up to a certain extent, the average component size of an application is negatively related to the user satisfaction for this application.