Understanding open source developers' evolution using TransFlow

  • Authors:

  • Jean M. R. Costa;Francisco W. Santana;Cleidson R. B. De Souza

  • Affiliations:

  • Faculdade de Computação, Instituto de Ciências Exatas e Naturais, Universidade Federal do Pará, Belém, Pará, Brasil;Faculdade de Computação, Instituto de Ciências Exatas e Naturais, Universidade Federal do Pará, Belém, Pará, Brasil;Faculdade de Computação, Instituto de Ciências Exatas e Naturais, Universidade Federal do Pará, Belém, Pará, Brasil

  • Venue:
  • CRIWG'09 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Groupware: design, implementation, and use
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Due to the success of many Open Source Software projects, both the industry and the academic community are interested in understanding how such software is produced. Particularly, there is interest in understanding how these communities are organized, maintained, and also how the contributors join and evolve their roles in these projects. However, few studies have been conducted around the evolution of the developers in the communities, i.e., how they reach roles of greater importance, and how the software changes over time through this evolution. This paper describes TransFlow, a tool aimed to support the integrated study of the evolution of both: the software itself and the developers' participation in open source projects. This integrated study is a requirement since the software architecture may support or hinder developers' participation in the project. We describe the rationale for building TransFlow and illustrate how its features can be used to study open source projects.