Article

Free access

Communication in open source software development mailing lists

Authors:

Alberto Bacchelli,

Martin Pinzger,

Arie van DeursenAuthors Info & Claims

MSR '13: Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Pages 277 - 286

Published: 18 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Open source software (OSS) development teams use electronic means, such as emails, instant messaging, or forums, to conduct open and public discussions. Researchers investigated mailing lists considering them as a hub for project communication. Prior work focused on specific aspects of emails, for example the handling of patches, traceability concerns, or social networks. This led to insights pertaining to the investigated aspects, but not to a comprehensive view of what developers communicate about. Our objective is to increase the understanding of development mailing lists communication.

We quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed a sample of 506 email threads from the development mailing list of a major OSS project, Lucene. Our investigation reveals that implementation details are discussed only in about 35% of the threads, and that a range of other topics is discussed. Moreover, core developers participate in less than 75% of the threads. We observed that the development mailing list is not the main player in OSS project communication, as it also includes other channels such as the issue repository.

References

[1]

A. Bacchelli, M. D'Ambros, and M. Lanza. Are popular classes more defect prone? In Proc. of FASE'10, pages 59-73, 2010.

Digital Library

[2]

A. Bacchelli, M. Lanza, and M. D'Ambros. Miler: A toolset for exploring email data. In Proc. of ICSE'11, pages 1025-1027, 2011.

Digital Library

[3]

A. Bacchelli, M. Lanza, and R. Robbes. Linking e-mails and source code artifacts. In Proc. of ICSE'10, pages 375-384. ACM Press, 2010.

Digital Library

[4]

I. Barker. What is information architecture? http://www.steptwo.com.au/, May 2005.

[5]

O. Baysal and A. J. Malton. Correlating social interactions to release history during software evolution. In Proc. of MSR'07, page 7. IEEE CS, 2007.

Digital Library

[6]

N. Bettenburg, E. Shihab, and A. E. Hassan. An empirical study on the risks of using o_-the-shelf techniques for processing mailing list data. In Proc. of ICSM'09, pages 539-542. IEEE CS, 2009.

[7]

C. Bird, A. Gourley, and P. Devanbu. Detecting patch submission and acceptance in OSS projects. In Proc. of MSR'07, pages 26-29. IEEE CS, 2007.

Digital Library

[8]

C. Bird, A. Gourley, P. Devanbu, M. Gertz, and A. Swaminathan. Mining email social networks. In Proc. of MSR'06, pages 137-143. ACM, 2006.

Digital Library

[9]

C. Bird, D. Pattison, R. D'Souza, V. Filkov, and P. Devanbu. Latent social structure in open source projects. In Proc. FSE'08, pages 24-35. ACM, 2008.

Digital Library

[10]

N. Ducheneaut. Socialization in an open source software community: A socio-technical analysis. CSCW, 14(4):323-368, 2005.

Digital Library

[11]

B. Flyvbjerg. Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative inquiry, 12(2):219-245, 2006.

[12]

K. Fogel. Producing Open Source Software. O'Reilly Media, 2005.

Digital Library

[13]

B. G. Glaser and A. L. Strauss. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies For Qualitative Research. Aldine, 1967.

[14]

C. Gutwin, R. Penner, and K. A. Schneider. Group awareness in distributed software development. In Proc. of CSCW'04, pages 72-81, 2004.

Digital Library

[15]

A. Guzzi, A. Begel, J. K. Miller, and K. Nareddy. Facilitating enterprise software developer communication with cares. In Proc. of ICSM'12, pages 527-536, 2012.

Digital Library

[16]

D. Kawrykow and M. P. Robillard. Non-essential changes in version histories. In Proc. of ICSE'11, pages 351-360, 2011.

Digital Library

[17]

K. Kuwabara. A bazaar at the edge of chaos. First Monday, 5(3), 2000.

[18]

B. Martin and B. Hanington. Universal Methods of Design. Rockport, 2012.

[19]

A. Mockus, R. T. Fielding, and J. D. Herbsleb. A case study of open source software development: the apache server. In Proc. of ICSE'00, pages 263-272, 2000.

Digital Library

[20]

T. H. D. Nguyen, B. Adams, and A. E. Hassan. A case study of bias in bug-fix datasets. In Proc. of WCRE 2010, pages 259-268. IEEE CS Press, 2010.

Digital Library

[21]

M. Ogawa, K.-L. Ma, C. Bird, P. T. Devanbu, and A. Gourley. Visualizing social interaction in open source software projects. In Proc. of APVIS07, pages 25-32, 2007.

[22]

D. Pattison, C. Bird, and P. Devanbu. Talk and Work: a Preliminary Report. In Proc. of MSR'08, pages 113-116. ACM, 2008.

Digital Library

[23]

E. Raymond. The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. O'Reilly, 1999.

Digital Library

[24]

P. C. Rigby, D. M. German, and M.-A. Storey. Open source software peer review practices: a case study of the Apache server. In Proc. of ICSE'08, pages 541-550. ACM, 2008.

Digital Library

[25]

P. C. Rigby and M.-A. Storey. Understanding broadcast based peer review on open source software projects. In Proc. of ICSE'11, pages 541-550. ACM, 2011.

Digital Library

[26]

A. Sarma, L. Maccherone, P. Wagstrom, and J. Herbsleb. Tesseract: Interactive visual exploration of socio-technical relationships in software development. In Proc. of ICSE'09, pages 23-33. IEEE CS Press, 2009.

Digital Library

[27]

A. Schröter, J. Aranda, D. Damian, and I. Kwan. To talk or not to talk: factors that influence communication around changesets. In Proc. of CSCW'12, pages 1317-1326, 2012.

Digital Library

[28]

C. B. Seaman. Qualitative methods in empirical studies of software engineering. IEEE TSE, 25:557-572, 1999.

Digital Library

[29]

E. Shihab, N. Bettenburg, B. Adams, and A. E. Hassan. On the central role of mailing lists in open source projects: An exploratory study. In JSAI-isAI Workshops, pages 91-103, 2009.

Digital Library

[30]

M. Triola. Elementary Statistics. Addison-Wesley, 2006.

[31]

T. Zimmermann, R. Premraj, N. Bettenburg, S. Just, A. Schroter, and C. Weiss. What makes a good bug report? IEEE TSE, 36(5):618-643, 2010.

Digital Library

Cited By

Notland JNowostawski MLi J(2023)Runtime Evolution of Bitcoin's Consensus RulesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.330485149:9(4477-4495)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3304851
Huang ZShao ZFan GYu HYang KZhou Z(2022)Bug Report Priority Prediction Using Developer-Oriented Socio-Technical FeaturesProceedings of the 13th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware10.1145/3545258.3545288(202-211)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3545258.3545288
Bock TSchmid AApel S(2021)Measuring and Modeling Group Dynamics in Open-Source Software Development: A Tensor Decomposition ApproachACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/347313931:2(1-50)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3473139
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Communication in open source software development mailing lists
1. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications
    1. Data mining
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software version control
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems

Recommendations

What Can OSS Mailing Lists Tell Us? A Preliminary Psychometric Text Analysis of the Apache Developer Mailing List
MSR '07: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories

Developer mailing lists are a rich source of information about Open Source Software (OSS) development. The unstructured nature of email makes extracting information difficult. We use a psychometrically-based linguistic analysis tool, the LIWC, to ...
SIGCSE mailing lists

For me, one of the best SIGCSE membership benefits is having access to the organization's mailing lists. We first began using an electronic listserv or mailing list in 1994 to be able to communicate with each other more easily and discuss issues and ...
Electronic mailing list

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Guide Proceedings

MSR '13: Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

May 2013

438 pages

ISBN:9781467329361

General Chair:
Thomas Zimmermann,
Program Chairs:
Massimiliano Di Penta,
Sunghun Kim

Publisher

IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 18 May 2013

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

35
Total Citations
View Citations
445
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)34
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)9

Reflects downloads up to 05 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Notland JNowostawski MLi J(2023)Runtime Evolution of Bitcoin's Consensus RulesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.330485149:9(4477-4495)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3304851
Huang ZShao ZFan GYu HYang KZhou Z(2022)Bug Report Priority Prediction Using Developer-Oriented Socio-Technical FeaturesProceedings of the 13th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware10.1145/3545258.3545288(202-211)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3545258.3545288
Bock TSchmid AApel S(2021)Measuring and Modeling Group Dynamics in Open-Source Software Development: A Tensor Decomposition ApproachACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/347313931:2(1-50)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3473139
Li XLiang PLi ZLi JJaccheri LDingsøyr TChitchyan R(2020)Automatic Identification of Decisions from the Hibernate Developer Mailing ListProceedings of the 24th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3383219.3383225(51-60)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3383219.3383225
Hirao TMcIntosh SIhara AMatsumoto KDumas MPfahl DApel SRusso A(2019)The review linkage graph for code review analytics: a recovery approach and empirical studyProceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3338906.3338949(578-589)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3338906.3338949
Gote CScholtes ISchweitzer FStorey MAdams BHaiduc S(2019)git2netProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1109/MSR.2019.00070(433-444)Online publication date: 26-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MSR.2019.00070
Ruangwan SThongtanunam PIhara AMatsumoto K(2019)The impact of human factors on the participation decision of reviewers in modern code reviewEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-018-9646-124:2(973-1016)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-018-9646-1
Zanaty FHirao TMcIntosh SIhara AMatsumoto KOivo MMéndez DMockus A(2018)An empirical study of design discussions in code reviewProceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3239235.3239525(1-10)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3239235.3239525
Morrison POyetoyan TWilliams LChaudron MCrnkovic IChechik MHarman M(2018)Identifying security issues in software developmentProceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings10.1145/3183440.3195040(426-427)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3183440.3195040
Käfer VGraziotin DBogicevic IWagner SRamadani JChaudron MCrnkovic IChechik MHarman M(2018)Communication in open-source projects-end of the e-mail era?Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings10.1145/3183440.3194951(242-243)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3183440.3194951
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents