The Social Structure of Open Source Software Development Authors: - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

the social structure of open source software development
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The Social Structure of Open Source Software Development Authors: - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

The Social Structure of Open Source Software Development Authors: Kevin Crowston and James Howison Presented by Bill Shenk What is social structure? Control Coordination Socialization Continuity Why study social structure for


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The Social Structure of Open Source Software Development

Authors: Kevin Crowston and James Howison Presented by Bill Shenk

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SLIDE 2

What is social structure?

  • Control
  • Coordination
  • Socialization
  • Continuity
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SLIDE 3

Why study social structure for OSSE?

“little is known about how people in these communities coordinate software development … or about what software processes, work practices, and

  • rganizational contexts are necessary to their

success.”

Walt Scacchi, “Software Development Practices in Open Software Development Communities: A Comparative Case Study”, 2002

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SLIDE 4

Why does this matter?

Understanding social structure can help with:

  • Development planning
  • Predictable relationships between code structure and

social structure

  • Risk management
  • Team members that are vital to the success of a project
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SLIDE 5

What's important when studying social structure?

  • Individuals

– Group size: small, large? constant, growing, shrinking?

  • Their actions

– How is the work divided? Who contributes what?

  • Their interactions

– Who talks to whom, how often, where? – Is the communication funneled somehow?

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Centralization and decentralization: Development

  • Actions: code is written
  • Centralized: a small core group of code contributors

– cathedral

  • Decentralized: contributions from a larger portion of

project individuals – bazaar

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SLIDE 7

Centralization and decentralization: Communication

  • Interactions between project members (via email, IM,

wiki, bug-tracking, etc.)

  • Centralized: small group who speak to the larger

group, and large group talks only to small group

  • Decentralized: project members speak to each other

as a whole

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SLIDE 8

Decentralized development and communication

Raymond (1998), Kuwabara (2000), Cox (1998) suggest that most OSS projects are decentralized in development, communication, or both

  • Decentralized development and planning are a good

indication of decentralized communication

  • “decentralized development” surrounded in “clamor

… anyone is welcome – the more people, the louder the clamor, the better it is.” - Kuwabara (2000)

  • The more the merrier!
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Decentralized communication and OSS

Alan Cox argues that bazaar projects can lead to “clique” formation

  • Linux for 8086: noise from inexperienced

programmers prompted the core developers to form a secluded group

  • Discussions should focus on existing code rather

than opinions and ideas, avoid “town councilors”

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Centralized communication and OSS

  • Centralized social structures can sometimes lead to

“ownership” of a project

  • Informal ownership often goes to founding

member(s) – e.g., Linux

  • Raymond (1998) believes that some centralization is

vital to OSS success

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Authors' Study

  • Examined communication centralization during bug-

fixing stage

  • Chosen because there are a “microcosm of

coordination problems” (Crowston 1997) and collaboration across many individuals and roles

  • Data taken from SourceForge through spiders and

parsers

  • Criteria: at least seven developers with at least 100

bugs per project from relatively active projects

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How the data was analyzed

  • SourceForge ID was used as an individual's identifier
  • Each message tied to a bug counts as one

interaction from one sender to another sender, starting with reporter

  • 23% of messages were sent anonymously,

considered extraneous and therefore not utilized (“nobody interactions”)

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Some raw figures

  • 120 projects (out of 50,000 at the time) were

analyzed that fit criteria and had available bug- tracking data

  • 61,068 bug reports, avg. of 509 per project – bugs

with at least one reply were counted

  • 14,922 total unique users (posters) with avg. of 140

users per project

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SLIDE 14

Centralization scores

  • Central project individuals are those who send and

receive greater number of messages

  • Members who send messages (out-degree centrality)

are measured for centrality

  • In a very centralized project, a single individual will

have a high out-degree; in decentralized, no one person stands out

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SLIDE 15

Pretty graph – interaction plot

Figure 5 – openrpg

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Pretty graph – interaction plot

Figure 9 – curl, centralization = 0.922

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Pretty graph – interaction plot

Figure 10 – squirrelmail, centralization = 0.377

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Distribution

Figure 8 – centralization scores for projects

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Project size vs. centralization

  • Authors discovered large projects are typically less

centralized

  • Possible interpretation: in a large project, it is difficult

for a single individual to fix every bug

  • Growing projects lead to modularity and formation of

smaller groups

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What does it all mean?!

  • Data and graphs show that the bug-tracking

communication, on the whole, was neither centralized nor decentralized

  • Average centralization: 0.56 ± 0.20
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Questions & Further Analysis

  • Projects that changed leaders?

(centralized → decentralized)

  • Posters with high out-degree might be verbose/unclear

and score artificially higher?

  • Mailing list communication centralization also measured

for 52 projects showed similar results. What about other ways of measuring communication centralization?

  • Communication centralization vs. development

centralization? Would it show similar results?

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SLIDE 22

Thank you!