Automating the measurement of open source projects

Submitted by msquire on Thu, 2011-04-21 15:57

Title	Automating the measurement of open source projects
Publication Type	Conference Paper
Year of Publication	2003
Authors	German, D, Mockus, A
Secondary Title	Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering
Pagination	63–67
Keywords	bug reports, bug tracking, changelog, cvs, defects, evolution, log files, logs, mailing list, scm, softchange, source code, ximian, ximian evolution
Abstract	The proliferation of open source projects raises a number of vital economic, social, and software engineering questions that are subject of intense research. Based on experience analyzing numerous open source and commercial projects we propose a set of tools to support extraction and validation of software project data. Such tools would streamline empirical investigation of open source projects and make it possible to test existing and new theories about the nature of open source projects. Our soft- ware includes tools to extract and summarize information from mailing lists, CVS logs, ChangeLog files, and defect tracking databases. More importantly, it cross-links records from various data sources and identifies all contributors for a software change. We illustrate some of the capabilities by analyzing data from Ximian Evolution project.
Notes	"We have chosen to use Evolution to illustrate some of the capabilities of SoftChange. We focus on the data provided by CVS logs and the CVS commit mailing list. Our data includes changes to the CVS repository from April 1998 to January 2003."
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