How the FLOSS Research Community Uses Email Archives

TitleHow the FLOSS Research Community Uses Email Archives
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2012
AuthorsSquire, M
Refereed DesignationRefereed
Secondary TitleInternational Journal of Open Source Software and Processes
Volume4
Issue1
Pagination37 - 59
Date Published12/2012
ISSN Number1942-3934
Keywordsemail, email archives, literature, mailing lists, review, Survey
Abstract

Artifacts of the software development process, such as source code or emails between developers, are a frequent object of study in empirical software engineering literature. One of the hallmarks of free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS) projects is that the artifacts of the development process are publicly-accessible and therefore easily collected and studied. Thus, there is a long history in the FLOSS research community of using these artifacts to gain understanding about the phenomenon of open source software, which could then be compared to studies of software engineering more generally. This paper looks specifically at how the FLOSS research community has used email artifacts from free and open source projects. It provides a classification of the relevant literature using a publicly-available online repository of papers about FLOSS development using email. The outcome of this paper is to provide a broad overview for the software engineering and FLOSS research communities of how other researchers have used FLOSS email message artifacts in their work

Notes

classifies 72 FLOSS papers into various analysis categories

DOI10.4018/jossp.2012010103
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