Enabling the Definition and Enforcement of Governance Rules in Open Source Systems

Governance rules in software development projects
help to prioritize and manage their development tasks, and
contribute to the long-term sustainability of the project by
clarifying how core and external contributors should collaborate
in order to advance the project during its whole lifespan. Despite
their importance, specially in Open Source Software (OSS)
projects, these rules are usually implicit or scattered in the
project documentation/tools (e.g., tracking-systems or forums),
hampering the correct understanding of the development process.
We propose to enable the explicit definition and enforcement of
governance rules for OSS projects. We believe this brings several
important benefits, including improvements in the transparency
of the process, its traceability and the semi-automation of the
governance itself. Our approach has been implemented on top of
Mylyn, a project-management Eclipse plug-in supporting most
popular tracking-systems.