Recovering Valuable Information Behaviour from OSS Contributors: An Exploratory Study.
Mário André de Freitas Farias, Paulo Ortins, Renato Lima Novais, Methanias Colaço Júnior, Manoel Mendonça · Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 2014
Context. Distributed software development is currently a modern practice in software industry. This is especially true in Open Source Software (OSS) development community. Understanding how developers’ practices are on those projects may guide communities to successfully manage their projects. Goal. We mined two repositories of the Apache Httpd project in order to gather information about its developers’ behavior. Methods. We developed an approach to cross data gathered from mail list and source code repository through mining techniques. The approach uses software visualization to analyze the mined data. We conducted an experimental evaluation of the approach to assess the behavioral patterns from OSS development community. Results. The collected data built a rich set of information.The results highlight Apache developers’ behavior patterns. We perceived that there is a correlation over time between emails and commits of the Apache Project developers. Conclusion. The use of data mining and software visualization to analyze crossing data sources can spot important properties of the development process.