@proceedings {1914, title = {Practices and Perceptions of UML Use in Open Source Projects}, year = {2017}, month = {05/2017}, pages = {203-212}, abstract = {Context: Open Source is getting more and more collaborative with industry. At the same time, modeling is today playing a crucial role in development of, e.g., safety critical software. Goal: However, there is a lack of research about the use of modeling in Open Source. Our goal is to shed some light into the motivation and benefits of the use of modeling and its use within project teams. Method: In this study, we perform a survey among Open Source developers. We focus on projects that use the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a representative for software modeling. Results: We received 485 answers of contributors of 458 different Open Source projects. Conclusion: Collaboration seems to be the most important motivation for using UML. It benefits new contributors and contributors who do not create models. Teams use UML during communication and planning of joint implementation efforts.}, keywords = {architecture documentation, communication, effectiveness of UML, github, MOTIVATION, UML}, author = {Truong Ho-Quang and Hebig, Regina and Gregorio Robles and Chaudron, Michel R. V. and Miguel Angel Fernandez} } @article {1746, title = {Evaluation of FLOSS by Analyzing Its Software Evolution:}, journal = {Journal of Information Technology Research}, volume = {8}, year = {2015}, month = {01/2015}, pages = {62 - 81}, abstract = {In today{\textquoteright}s world, management often rely on FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) systems to run their organizations. However, the nature of FLOSS is different from the software they have been using in the last decades. Its development model is distributed, and its authors are diverse as many volunteers and companies may collaborate in the project. In this paper, we want to shed some light on how to evaluate a FLOSS system by looking at the Moodle platform, which is currently the most used learning management system among educational institutions worldwide. In contrast with other evaluation models that have been proposed so far, the one we present is based on retrieving historical information that can be obtained publicly from the Internet, allowing us to study its evolution. As a result, we will show how by using our methodology management can take informed decisions that lower the risk that organizations face when investing in a FLOSS system. }, keywords = {free software, LMS, moodle, open source, software engineering, software evaluation, software evolution}, issn = {1938-7865}, doi = {10.4018/JITR.2015010105}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/Evaluation\%20of\%20FLOSS\%20by\%20Analyzing\%20its\%20Software\%20Evolution\%20-\%20An\%20Example\%20Using\%20the\%20Moodle\%20Platform.pdf}, author = {Macho, H{\'e}ctor J. and Gregorio Robles and Gonz{\'a}lez-Barahona, Jesus M} } @conference {Robles:2014:EDE:2597073.2597107, title = {Estimating Development Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects by Mining Software Repositories: A Case Study of OpenStack}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories}, series = {MSR 2014}, year = {2014}, pages = {222{\textendash}231}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, abstract = {Because of the distributed and collaborative nature of free / open source software (FOSS) projects, the development effort invested in a project is usually unknown, even after the software has been released. However, this information is becoming of major interest, especially ---but not only--- because of the growth in the number of companies for which FOSS has become relevant for their business strategy. In this paper we present a novel approach to estimate effort by considering data from source code management repositories. We apply our model to the OpenStack project, a FOSS project with more than 1,000 authors, in which several tens of companies cooperate. Based on data from its repositories and together with the input from a survey answered by more than 100 developers, we show that the model offers a simple, but sound way of obtaining software development estimations with bounded margins of error. }, keywords = {effort estimation, free software, mining software repositories, open source, openstack}, isbn = {978-1-4503-2863-0}, doi = {10.1145/2597073.2597107}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2597073.2597107}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/robles_0.pdf}, author = {Gregorio Robles and Gonz{\'a}lez-Barahona, Jes{\'u}s M. and Cervig{\'o}n, Carlos and Capiluppi, Andrea and Izquierdo-Cort{\'a}zar, Daniel} } @conference {Robles:2014:FSD:2597073.2597129, title = {FLOSS 2013: A Survey Dataset About Free Software Contributors: Challenges for Curating, Sharing, and Combining}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories}, series = {MSR 2014}, year = {2014}, pages = {396{\textendash}399}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, abstract = {In this data paper we describe a data set obtained by means of performing an on-line survey to over 2,000 Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) contributors. The survey includes questions related to personal characteristics (gender, age, civil status, nationality, etc.), education and level of English, professional status, dedication to FLOSS projects, reasons and motivations, involvement and goals. We describe as well the possibilities and challenges of using private information from the survey when linked with other, publicly available data sources. In this regard, an example of data sharing will be presented and legal, ethical and technical issues will be discussed. }, keywords = {anonymization, data combining, data sharing, ethics, free software, microdata, msr data showcase, open data, open source, privacy, Survey}, isbn = {978-1-4503-2863-0}, doi = {10.1145/2597073.2597129}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2597073.2597129}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/msr14gregorio.pdf}, author = {Gregorio Robles and Reina, Laura Arjona and Serebrenik, Alexander and Vasilescu, Bogdan and Gonz{\'a}lez-Barahona, Jes{\'u}s M.} } @article {1745, title = {SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF FREE/OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPERS: PRELIMINARY FINDINGS FROM A CASE STUDY}, journal = {Revista Eletr{\^o}nica de Sistemas de Informa{\c c}{\~a}o}, volume = {13}, year = {2014}, month = {08/2014}, abstract = {Software development is a human intensive activity. And as such, how developers face their tasks is of major importance. In an environment such as the one that is common in FOSS (free/open source software) projects where professionals (i.e., paid developers) share the development effort with volunteers, the morale of the development and user community is of major importance. In this paper, we present a preliminary analysis using sentiment analysis techniques to a FOSS project. We therefore mine the mailing list of a project and apply these techniques to the most relevant participants. Although the application is at this time limited, we hope that this experience can be of benefit in the future to determine situations that may affect the developers or the project, such as low productivity, developer abandonment, project forking, etc. }, keywords = {developer productivity, FLOSS, mailing lists, natural language processing, openSUSE, sentiment analysis, software development; software repository mining}, doi = {10.5329/RESI.2014.1302006}, url = {http://189.16.45.2/ojs/index.php/reinfo/article/view/1677}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/1677-6732-1-PB.pdf}, author = {Rousinopoulos, Athanasios-Ilias and Gregorio Robles and Gonz{\'a}lez-Barahona, Jes{\'u}s M.} } @proceedings {1458, title = {Do More Experienced Developers Introduce Fewer Bugs?}, volume = {378}, year = {2012}, note = {"Some Mozilla Foundation projects have been the selected case of study for this paper. The analysis is based on the Mercurial repository which offers a list of repositories that can be easily cloned. As a summary, 19 projects were analyzed, with more than 100,000 commits, more than 2,500 authors and around 4 years of history up to June 2011."}, month = {09/2012}, pages = {268-273}, publisher = {IFIP AICT, Springer}, abstract = {Developer experience is a common matter of study in the software maintenance and evolution research literature. However it is still not well understood if less experienced developers are more prone to introduce errors in the source code than their more experienced colleagues. This paper aims to study the relationships between experience and the bug introduction ratio using the Mozilla community as case of study. As results, statistical differences among developers with different levels of experience has not been observed, when the expected result would have been the opposite1.}, keywords = {mercurial, mozilla, scm, source code analysis}, author = {Izquierdo-Cort{\'a}zar, Daniel and Gregorio Robles and Gonz{\'a}lez-Barahona, Jes{\'u}s M.} } @conference {948, title = {Beyond replication: An example of the potential benefits of replicability in the mining of software repositories community}, booktitle = {1st Workshop on Replication in Empirical Software Engineering Research}, year = {2010}, month = {05/2010}, keywords = {literature review, msr, replication}, author = {Gregorio Robles and Daniel M. German} } @conference {947, title = {Replicating MSR: A study of the potential replicability of papers published in the Mining Software Repositories proceedings}, booktitle = {2010 7th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2010)2010 7th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2010)}, year = {2010}, pages = {171 - 180}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Cape Town, South Africa}, abstract = {This paper is the result of reviewing all papers published in the proceedings of the former International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) (2004-2006) and now Working Conference on MSR (2007-2009). We have analyzed the papers that contained any experimental analysis of software projects for their potentiality of being replicated. In this regard, three main issues have been addressed: i) the public availability of the data used as case study, ii) the public availability of the processed dataset used by researchers and iii) the public availability of the tools and scripts. A total number of 171 papers have been analyzed from the six workshops/working conferences up to date. Results show that MSR authors use in general publicly available data sources, mainly from free software repositories, but that the amount of publicly available processed datasets is very low. Regarding tools and scripts, for a majority of papers we have not been able to find any tool, even for papers where the authors explicitly state that they have built one. Lessons learned from the experience of reviewing the whole MSR literature and some potential solutions to lower the barriers of replicability are finally presented and discussed.}, keywords = {data, literature review, msr, replication}, isbn = {978-1-4244-6802-7}, doi = {10.1109/MSR.2010.5463348}, url = {http://gsyc.urjc.es/~grex/msr2010}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/171MSR_2010_69.final_.pdf}, author = {Gregorio Robles} } @article {1236, title = {Tools for the Study of the Usual Data Sources found in Libre Software Projects}, journal = {International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes}, volume = {1}, year = {2009}, month = {31/2009}, pages = {24 - 45}, abstract = {Due to the open nature of Free/Libre/Open Source software projects, researchers have gained access to a rich set of development-related information. Although this information is publicly available on the Internet, obtaining and analyzing it in a convenient way is not an easy task and many considerations have to be taken into account. In this paper we present the most important data sources that can be found in libre software projects and that are studied by the research community: source code, source code management systems, mailing lists and bug tracking systems. We will give advice for the problems that can be found when retrieving and preparing the data sources for a posterior analysis, as well as provide information about the tools that support these tasks.}, keywords = {bug tracking systems, data sources, mailing lists, scm, tools}, issn = {1942-3934}, doi = {10.4018/jossp.2009010102}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/robles.pdf}, author = {Gregorio Robles and Gonz{\'a}lez-Barahona, Jes{\'u}s M. and Izquierdo-Cortazar, Daniel and Herraiz, Israel} } @article {GonzalezBarahona2008356, title = {Geographic origin of libre software developers}, journal = {Information Economics and Policy}, volume = {20}, number = {4}, year = {2008}, note = {Empirical Issues in Open Source Software}, pages = {356 - 363}, abstract = {This paper examines the claim that libre (free, open source) software involves global development. The anecdotal evidence is that developers usually work in teams including individuals residing in many different geographical areas, time zones and even continents and that, as a whole, the libre software community is also diverse in terms of national origin. However, its exact composition is difficult to capture, since there are few records of the geographical location of developers. Past studies have been based on surveying a limited (and sometimes biased) sample and extrapolating that sample to the global distribution of developers. In this paper we present an alternate approach in which databases are analyzed to create traces of information from which the geographical origin of developers can be inferred. Applying this technique to the SourceForge users database and the mailing lists archives from several large projects, we have estimated the geographical origin of more than one million individuals who are closely related to the libre software development process. The paper concludes that the result is a good proxy for the actual distribution of libre software developers working on global projects.}, keywords = {developers, email, email address, email archives, geography, mailing list, open source software, sourceforge, timezone, users}, issn = {0167-6245}, doi = {DOI: 10.1016/j.infoecopol.2008.07.001}, url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V8J-4T3DCPK-1/2/3981dfbc523eae1d1ce65fb1f0c0edb7}, author = {Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona and Gregorio Robles and Roberto Andradas-Izquierdo and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh} } @conference {Herraiz:2008:TSB:1370750.1370786, title = {Towards a simplification of the bug report form in eclipse}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories}, series = {MSR {\textquoteright}08}, year = {2008}, pages = {145{\textendash}148}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, abstract = {We believe that the bug report form of Eclipse contains too many fields, and that for some fields, there are too many options. In this MSR challenge report, we focus in the case of the severity field. That field contains seven different levels of severity. Some of them seem very similar, and it is hard to distinguish among them. Users assign severity, and developers give priority to the reports depending on their severity. However, if users can not distinguish well among the various severity options, they will probably assign different priorities to bugs that require the same priority. We study the mean time to close bugs reported in Eclipse, and how the severity assigned by users affects this time. The results shows that classifying by time to close, there are less clusters of bugs than levels of severity. We therefore conclude that there is a need to make a simpler bug report form.}, keywords = {bug fixing, bug report, bug tracking system, classification, eclipse, msr challenge, severity}, isbn = {978-1-60558-024-1}, doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1370750.1370786}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1370750.1370786}, author = {Herraiz, Israel and Daniel M. German and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona and Gregorio Robles} } @conference {1013, title = {Impact of the Creation of the Mozilla Foundation in the Activity of Developers}, booktitle = {Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR{\textquoteright}07:ICSE Workshops 2007)}, year = {2007}, pages = {28 - 28}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Minneapolis, MN, USA}, abstract = {During 2003, the Mozilla project transitioned from company-promoted (sponsored by AOL) to community-promoted (sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation). What happened to the group of developers during this transition? There was any significant impact on its activity or composition? To answer these questions, we have performed an analysis of the CVS repository of Mozilla, using the CVSAnalY tool, finding little on activity, but dramatic changes in the the composition of the development team.}, keywords = {cvs, cvsanaly, developers, mining challenge, mozilla, msr challenge, revision history}, isbn = {0-7695-2950-X}, doi = {10.1109/MSR.2007.15}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/28300028.pdf}, author = {Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona and Gregorio Robles and Herraiz, Israel} } @conference {1006, title = {Towards a Theoretical Model for Software Growth}, booktitle = {Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR{\textquoteright}07:ICSE Workshops 2007)}, year = {2007}, pages = {21 - 21}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Minneapolis, MN, USA}, abstract = {Software growth (and more broadly, software evolution) is usually considered in terms of size or complexity of source code. However in different studies, usually different metrics are used, which make it difficult to compare approaches and results. In addition, not all metrics are equally easy to calculate for a given source code, which leads to the question of which one is the easiest to calculate without losing too much information. To address both issues, in this paper present a comprehensive study, based on the analysis of about 700,000 C source code files, calculating several size and complexity metrics for all of them. For this sample, we have found double Pareto statistical distributions for all metrics considered, and a high correlation between any two of them. This would imply that any model addressing software growth should produce this Pareto distributions, and that analysis based on any of the considered metrics should show a similar pattern, provided the sample of files considered is large enough.}, keywords = {C, complexity, evolution, freebsd, growth, halstead, lines of code, loc, mccabe, metrics, scm, size, sloc, sloccount, source code}, isbn = {0-7695-2950-X}, doi = {10.1109/MSR.2007.31}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/28300021.pdf}, author = {Herraiz, Israel and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona and Gregorio Robles} } @conference {Herraiz:2006:CSN:1116163.1116405, title = {Comparison Between SLOCs and Number of Files As Size Metrics for Software Evolution Analysis}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering}, series = {CSMR {\textquoteright}06}, year = {2006}, pages = {206{\textendash}213}, publisher = {IEEE Computer Society}, organization = {IEEE Computer Society}, address = {Washington, DC, USA}, keywords = {empirical studies, libre software, metrics, software evolution}, isbn = {0-7695-2536-9}, url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1116163.1116405}, author = {Herraiz, Israel and Gregorio Robles and Gonzalez-Barahon, Jes us M.} } @conference {686, title = {Contributor Turnover in Libre Software Projects}, booktitle = {OSS2006: Open Source Systems (IFIP 2.13)}, series = {IFIP International Federation for Information Processing}, year = {2006}, pages = {273 - 286}, publisher = {Springer}, organization = {Springer}, abstract = {A common problem that management faces in software companies is the high instability of their staff. In libre (free, open source) software projects, the permanence of developers is also an open issue, with the potential of causing problems amplified by the self-organizing nature that most of them exhibit. Hence, human resources in libre software projects are even more difficult to manage: developers are in most cases not bound by a contract and, in addition, there is not a real management structure concerned about this problem. This raises some interesting questions with respect to the composition of development teams in libre software projects, and how they evolve over time. There are projects lead by their original founders (some sort of {\textquotedblleft}code gods{\textquotedblright}), while others are driven by several different developer groups over time (i.e. the project {\textquotedblleft}regenerates{\textquotedblright} itself). In this paper, we propose a quantitative methodology, based on the analysis of the activity in the source code management repositories, to study how these processes (developers leaving, developers joining) affect libre software projects. The basis of it is the analysis of the composition of the core group, the group of developers most active in a project, for several time lapses. We will apply this methodology to several large, well-known libre software projects, and show how it can be used to characterize them. In addition, we will discuss the lessons that can be learned, and the validity of our proposal. }, keywords = {apache, committers, core, cvs, cvsanaly, developers, evolution, freebsd, gimp, gnome, kde, mono, mozilla}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34226-5_28}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/Contributor\%20Turnover\%20in\%20Libre\%20Software\%20Projects.pdf}, author = {Gregorio Robles and Gonzalez-Barahona, Jesus} } @conference {Amor:2006:EEC:1139113.1139116, title = {Effort Estimation by Characterizing Developer Activity}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2006 International Workshop on Economics Driven Software Engineering Research}, series = {EDSER {\textquoteright}06}, year = {2006}, pages = {3{\textendash}6}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, abstract = {During the latest years libre (free, open source) software has gained a lot of attention from the industry. Following this interest, the research community is also studying it. For instance, many teams are performing quantitative analysis on the large quantity of data which is publicly available from the development repositories maintained by libre software projects. However, not much of this research is focused on cost or effort estimations, despite its importance (for instance, for companies developing libre software or collaborating with libre software projects), and the availability of some data which could be useful for this purpose. Our position is that classical effort estimation models can be improved from the study of these data, at least when applied to libre software. In this paper, we focus on the characterization of developer activity, which we argue can improve effort estimation. This activity can be traced with a lot of detail, and the resulting data can also be used for validation of any effort estimation model. }, keywords = {developer characterization, effort estimation, mining software repositories, open source software, software economics}, isbn = {1-59593-396-4}, doi = {10.1145/1139113.1139116}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1139113.1139116}, author = {Amor, Juan Jose and Gregorio Robles and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona} } @conference {Robles:2006:GLD:1137983.1138017, title = {Geographic location of developers at SourceForge}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories}, series = {MSR {\textquoteright}06}, year = {2006}, pages = {144{\textendash}150}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, abstract = {The development of libre (free/open source) software is usually performed by geographically distributed teams. Participation in most cases is voluntary, sometimes sporadic, and often not framed by a pre-defined management structure. This means that anybody can contribute, and in principle no national origin has advantages over others, except for the differences in availability and quality of Internet connections and language. However, differences in participation across regions do exist, although there are little studies about them. In this paper we present some data which can be the basis for some of those studies. We have taken the database of users registered at SourceForge, the largest libre software development web-based platform, and have inferred their geographical locations. For this, we have applied several techniques and heuristics on the available data (mainly e-mail addresses and time zones), which are presented and discussed in detail. The results show a snapshot of the regional distribution of SourceForge users, which may be a good proxy of the actual distribution of libre software developers. In addition, the methodology may be of interest for similar studies in other domains, when the available data is similar (as is the case of mailing lists related to software projects).}, keywords = {distributed, email, email address, free software, geographical location, geography, libre software, mining software repositories, open source software, sourceforge, timezone}, isbn = {1-59593-397-2}, doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1137983.1138017}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1137983.1138017}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/144GeographicLocation.pdf}, author = {Gregorio Robles and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona} } @conference {Robles:2006:MLS:1137983.1137986, title = {Mining large software compilations over time: another perspective of software evolution}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories}, series = {MSR {\textquoteright}06}, year = {2006}, pages = {3{\textendash}9}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, abstract = {With the success of libre (free, open source) software, a new type of software compilation has become increasingly common. Such compilations, often referred to as {\textquoteright}distributions{\textquoteright}, group hundreds, if not thousands, of software applications and libraries written by independent parties into an integrated system. Software compilations raise a number of questions that have not been targeted so far by software evolution, which usually focuses on the evolution of single applications. Undoubtedly, the challenges that software compilations face differ from those found in single software applications. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that both, the evolution of applications and that of software compilations, have similarities and dependencies.In this sense, we identify a dichotomy, common to that in economics, of software evolution in the small (micro-evolution) and in the large (macro-evolution). The goal of this paper is to study the evolution of a large software compilation, mining the publicly available repository of a well-known Linux distribution, Debian. We will therefore investigate changes related to hundreds of millions of lines of code over seven years. The aspects that will be covered in this paper are size (in terms of number of packages and of number of lines of code), use of programming languages, maintenance of packages and file sizes.}, keywords = {debian, distributions, evolution, large software collections, lines of code, loc, metrics, mining software repositories, size, sloc, sloccount, software evolution, software integrators}, isbn = {1-59593-397-2}, doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1137983.1137986}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1137983.1137986}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/3miningLarge.pdf}, author = {Gregorio Robles and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona and Martin Michlmayr and Amor, Juan Jose} } @conference {Robles:2005:DIM:1083142.1083162, title = {Developer identification methods for integrated data from various sources}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories}, series = {MSR {\textquoteright}05}, year = {2005}, pages = {106-110}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, abstract = {Studying a software project by mining data from a single repository has been a very active research field in software engineering during the last years. However, few efforts have been devoted to perform studies by integrating data from various repositories, with different kinds of information, which would, for instance, track the different activities of developers. One of the main problems of these multi-repository studies is the different identities that developers use when they interact with different tools in different contexts. This makes them appear as different entities when data is mined from different repositories (and in some cases, even from a single one). In this paper we propose an approach, based on the application of heuristics, to identify the many identities of developers in such cases, and a data structure for allowing both the anonymized distribution of information, and the tracking of identities for verification purposes. The methodology will be presented in general, and applied to the GNOME project as a case example. Privacy issues and partial merging with new data sources will also be considered and discussed.}, keywords = {anonymization, bug tracker, developers, email, email address, gnome, identity, mailing list, privacy, source code, version control}, isbn = {1-59593-123-6}, doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1082983.1083162}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1082983.1083162}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/106DeveloperIdentification.pdf}, author = {Gregorio Robles and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona} } @conference {731, title = {Evolution of Volunteer Participation in Libre Software Projects: Evidence from Debian}, booktitle = {OSS2005: Open Source Systems }, year = {2005}, note = {"For each release we have retrieved the corresponding sources.gz file (see below) from the Debian archive. From it we have extracted information about the packages and their maintainers...." }, pages = {100-107}, abstract = {Most libre software projects rely on the work of volunteers. Therefore, attracting people who contribute their time and technical skills is of paramount importance, both in technical and economic terms. This reliance on volunteers leads to some fundamental management challenges: volunteer contributions are inherently difficult to predict, plan and manage, especially in the case of large projects. In this paper we analyze the evolution in time of the human resources of one of the largest and most complex libre software projects composed primarily of volunteers, the Debian project. Debian currently has around 1300 volunteers working on several tasks: much activity is focused on packaging software applications and libraries, but there is also major work related to the maintenance of the infrastructure needed to sustain the development. We have performed a quantitative investigation of data from almost seven years, studying how volunteer involvement has affected the software...}, keywords = {contributors, debian, maintainers, PopCon, popularity, Volunteers}, url = {http://pascal.case.unibz.it/handle/2038/857}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/robles_barahona_michlmayr-evolution_participation.pdf}, author = {Gregorio Robles and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona and Martin Michlmayr} }