On the central role of mailing lists in open source projects: an exploratory study

Authors:
Emad Shihab;Nicolas Bettenburg;Bram Adams;Ahmed E. Hassan
Affiliations:
Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada;Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada;Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada;Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada
Venue:
JSAI-isAI'09 Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on New frontiers in artificial intelligence
Year:
2009

Citing 16
Cited 4

Collaboration with Lean Media: how open-source software succeeds

CSCW '00 Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Software Defect Reduction Top 10 List

Computer
Using software trails to reconstruct the evolution of software: Research Articles

Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice - Analyzing the Evolution of Large-Scale Software
Developer identification methods for integrated data from various sources

MSR '05 Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories
Mining email social networks

Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories
Analyzing OSS developers' working time using mailing lists archives

Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories
Actor centrality correlates to project based coordination

CSCW '06 Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Open Borders? Immigration in Open Source Projects

MSR '07 Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories
Correlating Social Interactions to Release History during Software Evolution

MSR '07 Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories
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
Detecting Patch Submission and Acceptance in OSS Projects

MSR '07 Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories
Understanding knowledge sharing activities in free/open source software projects: An empirical study

Journal of Systems and Software
Open source software peer review practices: a case study of the apache server

Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering
Small patches get in!

Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories
Talk and work: a preliminary report

Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories
Latent social structure in open source projects

Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering

The true role of active communicators: an empirical study of Jazz core developers

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
Adopting softer approaches in the study of repository data: a comparative analysis

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
Intensive metrics for the study of the evolution of open source projects: case studies from apache software foundation projects

Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Communication in open source software development mailing lists

Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Mailing lists provide a rich set of data that can be used to improve and enhance our understanding of software processes and practices. This information allows us to study development characteristics like team structure, activity, and social interaction. In this paper, we perform an exploratory study on the GNOME project and recover operational knowledge from mailing list discussions. Our findings indicate that mailing list activity is driven by a dominant group of participants, that it is greatly connected to development activity, yet influenced by external factors like market competition. Our results provide a broad picture of the central role played by mailing lists in open source projects.