Communications of the ACM
Collaboration with Lean Media: how open-source software succeeds
CSCW '00 Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
What Is Software Testing? And Why Is It So Hard?
IEEE Software
Contrasting Community Building in Sponsored and Community Founded Open Source Projects
HICSS '05 Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Volume 07
Communications of the ACM - Two decades of the language-action perspective
On Understanding How to Introduce an Innovation to an Open Source Project
ICSEW '07 Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops
A socio-cognitive analysis of online design discussions in an Open Source Software community
Interacting with Computers
Fearless change patterns for introducing new ideas
Fearless change patterns for introducing new ideas
Tesseract: Interactive visual exploration of socio-technical relationships in software development
ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
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Medium-sized, open-participation Open Source Software (OSS) projects do not usually perform explicit software process improvement on any routine basis. It would be useful to understand how to get such a project to accept a process improvement proposal and hence to perform process innovation. We want to determine an effective and feasible qualitative research method for studying the above question. We present (narratively) a case study of how we worked towards and eventually found such a research method. The case involves four attempts at collecting suitable data about innovation episodes (direct participation (twice), polling developers for episodes, manually finding episodes in mailing list archives) and the adaptation of the Grounded Theory data analysis methodology. Direct participation allows gathering rather rich data, but does not allow for observing a sufficiently large number of innovation episodes. Polling developers for episodes did not prove to be useful. Using mailing list archives to find data to be analyzed is both feasible and effective. We also describe how the data thus found can be analyzed based on the Grounded Theory Method with suitable adjustments. By-and-large, our findings ought to apply to studying various phenomena in OSS development processes that are similarly heavyweight and infrequent. However, specific details may block this possibility and we cannot predict which details that might be. The amount of effort involved in direct participation approaches to qualitative research can easily be underestimated. Also, survey approaches are not well-suited for many process issues in OSS, because too few developers are sufficiently process-conscious. An approach based on passive observation is a viable alternative in the OSS context due to the availability of large amounts of fairly complete archival data.