Distributed Collective Practices and F/OSS Problem Management: Perspective and Methods
| Title | Distributed Collective Practices and F/OSS Problem Management: Perspective and Methods |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2003 |
| Authors | Gasser, Les, and Ripoche Gabriel |
| Secondary Title | Conference on Cooperation, Innovation & Technology (CITE 2003) |
| Keywords | Automated process extraction, bug fixing, bug reports, bugzilla, Collective knowledge management, Information extraction from natural language texts, mozilla, Software problem management |
| Abstract | This paper presents the state of our research on Distributed Collective Practices (DCPs) in Free/Open-Source Software (F/OSS) projects, focusing on sensemaking and resolution of software problems. We are exploring the hypothesis that variations in the content and in the articulation of these socio-technical processes have an impact on the outcome of the activity of F/OSS collectives, and more specifically on problem resolution. Our preliminary techniques for combining qualitative data analysis with automated process extraction result in a scalable analysis method called Computational Amplification (CA). We are applying CA to 128,000 problem reports from the Mozilla F/OSS project. The paper illustrates how CA is used to create multidimensional process models and shows types of conclusions we can reach. |
| Notes | "We have begun studying in detail the general issues raised above using a large collection of research data from the Mozilla project" |
