The Influence of Software Product Quality Attributes on Open Source Projects: A Characterization Study

Antonio Cesar Brandao Silva, Kattiana Constantino, Glauco de Figueiredo Carneiro, Antonio Carlos M. de Paula, Eduardo Figueiredo, Miguel P. Monteiro, Fernando Brito e Abreu

2017

Abstract

Several Open Source Software (OSS) projects have adopted frequent releases as a strategy to deliver both new features and fix bugs on time. These entails express requests from the project’s community, registered as issues in bug repositories by active users and developers. Each OSS project has its own priorities established by their respective communities. A still open question is to what extent these priorities influence selection of the issues that should be tackled first, implemented/solved and delivered in subsequent releases. In this paper, we present an exploratory study on the influence of target product quality attributes in software release practices of OSS projects. The goal is to search for evidence that clarify the relationships between target attributes, priorities assigned to the registered issues and the ways they are delivered by product releases. To this end, we asked a set of participants to identify these attributes through the data analysis of repositories of three well-known OSS projects: Libre Office, Eclipse and Mozilla Firefox. Evidence provided by the participants suggest that OSS community developers use criteria/priorities driven by specific software product quality attributes to plan and perform software releases.

References

  1. Adams, B., Kavanagh, R., Hassan, A. E., and German, D. M. (2015). An empirical study of integration activities in distributions of open source software. Empirical Software Engineering, pages 1-42.
  2. Bijlsma, D., Ferreira, M. A., Luijten, B., and Visser, J. (2012). Faster issue resolution with higher technical quality of software. Software quality journal, 20(2):265-285.
  3. Crowston, K., Annabi, H., and Howison, J. (2003). Defining open source software project success. ICIS 2003 Proceedings, page 28.
  4. da Costa, D. A., Abebe, S. L., McIntosh, S., Kulesza, U., and Hassan, A. E. (2014). An empirical study of delays in the integration of addressed issues. In ICSME, pages 281-290.
  5. Fitzgerald, B. (2006). The transformation of open source software. Mis Quarterly, pages 587-598.
  6. Gamalielsson, J. and Lundell, B. (2014). Sustainability of open source software communities beyond a fork: How and why has the libreoffice project evolved? Journal of Systems and Software, 89:128-145.
  7. Gonzalez-Barahona, J. M., Izquierdo-Cortazar, D., Maffulli, S., and Robles, G. (2013). Understanding how companies interact with free software communities. IEEE software, (5):38-45.
  8. Gonzalez-Barahona, J. M. and Robles, G. (2013). Trends in free, libre, open source software communities: From volunteers to companies. it-Information Technology it-Information Technology , 55(5):173-180.
  9. Henningsson, K. and Wohlin, C. (2002). Understanding the relations between software quality attributes-a survey approach. In Proceedings 12th International Conference for Software Quality. Citeseer.
  10. ISO, I. (2011). Iec 25010: 2011,“. Systems and Software Engineering-Systems and Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE)-System and Software Quality Models.
  11. ISO/IEC (2001). ISO/IEC 9126. Software engineering - Product quality. ISO/IEC.
  12. Jonsson, L., Borg, M., Broman, D., Sandahl, K., Eldh, S., and Runeson, P. (2015). Automated bug assignment: Ensemble-based machine learning in large scale industrial contexts. Empirical Software Engineering, pages 1-46.
  13. Mantyla, M. V., Khomh, F., Adams, B., Engstrom, E., and Petersen, K. (2013). On rapid releases and software testing. In Software Maintenance (ICSM), 2013 29th IEEE International Conference on, pages 20-29. IEEE.
  14. Michlmayr, M., Fitzgerald, B., and Stol, K.-J. (2015). Why and how should open source projects adopt time-based releases? Software, IEEE, 32(2):55-63.
  15. Offutt, J. (2002). Quality attributes of web software applications. IEEE software, 19(2):25.
  16. Oreg, S. and Nov, O. (2008). Exploring motivations for contributing to open source initiatives: The roles of contribution context and personal values. Computers in human behavior, 24(5):2055-2073.
  17. Perepletchikov, M., Ryan, C., and Tari, Z. (2005). The impact of software development strategies on project and structural software attributes in soa. In OTM Confederated International Conferences" On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems", pages 442-451. Springer.
  18. Pfleeger, S. L. (1995). Experimental design and analysis in software engineering. Annals of Software Engineering, 1(1):219-253.
  19. Rigby, P. C., Cleary, B., Painchaud, F., Storey, M.-A., and German, D. M. (2012). Contemporary peer review in action: Lessons from open source development. Software, IEEE, 29(6):56-61.
  20. Stol, K.-J. and Fitzgerald, B. (2015). Inner source-adopting open source development practices in organizations: A tutorial. IEEE Software, (4):60-67.
  21. Thomas, L., Schach, S. R., Heller, G. Z., and Offutt, J. (2009). Impact of release intervals on empirical research into software evolution, with application to the maintainability of linux. Software, IET, 3(1):58-66.
  22. Wohlin, C., Runeson, P., Höst, M., Ohlsson, M. C., Regnell, B., and Wesslén, A. (2012). Experimentation in software engineering. Springer Science & Business Media.
  23. Ye, Y. and Kishida, K. (2003). Toward an understanding of the motivation of open source software developers. In Software Engineering, 2003. Proceedings. 25th International Conference on, pages 419-429. IEEE.
  24. Yin, R. K. and Campbell, D. (2003). Case study research: Design and methods. applied social science research methods series, vol. 5.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Cesar Brandao Silva A., Constantino K., de Figueiredo Carneiro G., Carlos M. de Paula A., Figueiredo E., P. Monteiro M. and Brito e Abreu F. (2017). The Influence of Software Product Quality Attributes on Open Source Projects: A Characterization Study . In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-758-248-6, pages 29-39. DOI: 10.5220/0006265400290039


in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis17,
author={Antonio Cesar Brandao Silva and Kattiana Constantino and Glauco de Figueiredo Carneiro and Antonio Carlos M. de Paula and Eduardo Figueiredo and Miguel P. Monteiro and Fernando Brito e Abreu},
title={The Influence of Software Product Quality Attributes on Open Source Projects: A Characterization Study},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS,},
year={2017},
pages={29-39},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006265400290039},
isbn={978-989-758-248-6},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS,
TI - The Influence of Software Product Quality Attributes on Open Source Projects: A Characterization Study
SN - 978-989-758-248-6
AU - Cesar Brandao Silva A.
AU - Constantino K.
AU - de Figueiredo Carneiro G.
AU - Carlos M. de Paula A.
AU - Figueiredo E.
AU - P. Monteiro M.
AU - Brito e Abreu F.
PY - 2017
SP - 29
EP - 39
DO - 10.5220/0006265400290039