@article {1398,
	title = {The search for a research method for studying OSS process innovation},
	journal = {Empirical Software Engineering},
	volume = {16},
	year = {2011},
	month = {8/2011},
	pages = {514 - 537},
	abstract = {Medium-sized, open-participation Open Source Software (OSS) projects do not usually perform explicit software process improvement on any routine basis. It would be useful to understand how to get such a project to accept a process improvement proposal and hence to perform process innovation. We want to determine an effective and feasible qualitative research method for studying the above question. We present (narratively) a case study of how we worked towards and eventually found such a research method. The case involves four attempts at collecting suitable data about innovation episodes (direct participation (twice), polling developers for episodes, manually finding episodes in mailing list archives) and the adaptation of the Grounded Theory data analysis methodology. Direct participation allows gathering rather rich data, but does not allow for observing a sufficiently large number of innovation episodes. Polling developers for episodes did not prove to be useful. Using mailing list archives to find data to be analyzed is both feasible and effective. We also describe how the data thus found can be analyzed based on the Grounded Theory Method with suitable adjustments. By-and-large, our findings ought to apply to studying various phenomena in OSS development processes that are similarly heavyweight and infrequent. However, specific details may block this possibility and we cannot predict which details that might be. The amount of effort involved in direct participation approaches to qualitative research can easily be underestimated. Also, survey approaches are not well-suited for many process issues in OSS, because too few developers are sufficiently process-conscious. An approach based on passive observation is a viable alternative in the OSS context due to the availability of large amounts of fairly complete archival data. },
	keywords = {argouml, Bochs, bugzilla, Flyspray, FreeDOS, gEDA, grounded theory, Grub, Innovation introduction, KVM, mailing list, Methodology, MonetDB, open source, Request Tracket, Rox, U-Boot, Xfce},
	issn = {1573-7616},
	doi = {10.1007/s10664-011-9160-1},
	author = {Prechelt, Lutz and Oezbek, Christopher}
}
@conference {Oezbek:2010:OCS:1833272.1833274,
	title = {The onion has cancer: some social network analysis visualizations of open source project communication},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Free/Libre/Open Source Software Research and Development (FLOSS {\textquoteright}10)},
	series = {FLOSS {\textquoteright}10},
	year = {2010},
	note = {paper d/l from www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~oezbek/pub/OezThiPre10-SNA.pdf

"We study the introduction of process innovations in Open Source projects [33] by manually extracting innovation episodes from arch- ives of mailing-lists and analyzing these episodes qualitatively by the Grounded Theory Method [38]."

"we took all messages from the mailing-list archives in 2007 of the projects we were studying, turned each participant into a node (unifying multi- ple e-mail addresses where needed [6]), and computed relationship strength between A and B as the number of e-mails that are a reply of B to a message from A or vice versa, according to the in-reply-to header of the e-mail."

Our data set covers 11 of the 13 projects (from 7 different do- mains, selected from mailing-list archive Gmane to build a diverse set of projects) for which we analyzed innovation episodes. They include three workflow applications (Bugzilla, Flyspray, Request Tracker), two desktop environments (Rox, Xfce), two design tools (ArgoUML, a UML CASE tool; gEDA, a set of electronic design automation tools), one bootloader (Grub), one hardware emulator (Bochs), one operating system (FreeDOS), and one database man- agement system (MonetDB).},
	pages = {5{\textendash}10},
	publisher = {ACM},
	organization = {ACM},
	address = {New York, NY, USA},
	abstract = {Background: People contribute to OSS projects in wildly different degrees, from reporting a single defect once and never coming back to spending many hours each workday on the project over several years - or anything in between. It is a common conception that these degrees of participation sort the participants into a number of similar groups which are layered like the peels of an onion: The onion model. Objective: We check whether this model of gradually different degrees of participation is valid with respect to the participation in OSS project mailing-list traffic. Methods: We perform social network analysis based on replies to mailing-list messages and use visualization to check the nature of three different groups of participants. Results: There appears to be a discontinuity with respect to core members: The degree to which very active core members (as opposed to less active co-developers) react to e-mails of senders from the project{\textquoteright}s periphery is significantly higher than would be expected from their level of activity in general. Limitations: The effect might be an artifact of the assumption that each mailing-list message can be treated the same. Conclusions: We conclude that core member status may be qualitatively (rather than just quantitatively) different and the transition of individual mailing-list participants towards ever higher participation is qualitatively discontinuous.},
	keywords = {argouml, Bochs, bugzilla, communication structure, Flyspray, gEDA, Grub, MonetDB, open source process, request tracker, Rox, social network analysis, Xfce},
	isbn = {978-1-60558-978-7},
	doi = {10.1145/1833272.1833274},
	url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1833272.1833274},
	attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/OezThiPre10-SNA.pdf},
	author = {Oezbek, Christopher and Prechelt, Lutz and Thiel, Florian}
}
