Understanding the Open-Source Software Development Process: a Case Study with CVSChecker

The open-source process model is emerging as a new lightweight paradigm for software development and has already produced several successful products. This process is fundamentally different from more traditional analysis- and design-driven processes, which raises a set of interesting research questions: what activities are carried out in open-source projects and by whom? Are there typical or exceptional patterns? CVSChecker is a tool designed to analyze the performance of individual developers and the work-distribution patterns of teams based on historical source-code repository data. In this paper, we report on a case study conducted using CVSChecker to examine a small open-source project. We discuss the insights that the CVSChecker analysis produced regarding this project and compare them to results from previous case studies performed with senior student teams.