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Collaborative Software Design & Development Open Source Systems 4 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 Collaborative Software Design & Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project Apache Field Support Kyle Cullen and Sabrina Smith 2/21/08 © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 1 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The papers we’ll be covering: The FreeBSD Project: A Replication Case Study of Open Source Development Trung T. Dinh-Trong - Research scientist at Avaya Labs James M. Bieman - Professor at Colorado State University and Director of the Software Assurance Laboratory How open source software works: “free” user-to-user assistance Karim R. Lakhani - Assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School Eric von Hippel - Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 2 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 Advantages / Disadvantages Advantages Freedom to work on whatever you want The review of others’ works could potentially lead to an increase in your overall software development skill level You can work at your own pace – no deadlines Disadvantages Lack of formal process Poor design and architecture Lack of development tools that are comparable to closed-source industry tools Lack of knowledge of the users’ needs © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 3 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: Main Idea A study of FreeBSD to determine contributing factors to successful OSS projects Characteristics of previously successful OSS projects Not guaranteed to be necessary or sufficient to future successful OSS projects How? Do the 7 hypotheses presented by Mockus et al. in “Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla” hold up for other projects? Specifically, FreeBSD © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 4 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: Data Sources Email, Bug Reports, and CVS Java program used to search through these data sources and extract relevant information the number of committers the number of deltas committed by each person etc. Questionnaire sent to each of the FreeBSD core developers © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 5 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: Questionnaire Question 1: “What was the process used to develop FreeBSD?” Roles of FreeBSD participants core developers – a small group of senior developers who are responsible for deciding the overall goals and direction of the project committers – developers who have the authority to commit changes to the project CVS repository contributors – people who want to contribute to the project but do not have committer privileges How do individuals identify what they will work on? contributors do what is interesting come up with new feature fix a bug you have found search through list of current bugs and desired features core developers do the rest (mundane tasks, etc.) © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 6 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: Questionnaire Question 1: “What was the process used to develop FreeBSD?” cont. Code Release Deadlines 45 days – integration notifications sent out (15 days left!) 30 days – peer reviews and last minute bug fixes 15 days – code freeze and weekly distributions start (beta versions) 0 days – final release © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 7 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: Questionnaire Question 2: “How many people wrote code for new functionality? How many people reported problems? How many people repaired defects?” 354 committers added code between 1933 and April 2003 337 committers checked in new features 6082+ unique individuals reported problems 224 committers fixed problems © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 8 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: Questionnaire Question 3: “Were these functions carried out by distinct groups of people, that is, did people primarily assume a single role? Did large numbers of people participate somewhat equally in these activities, or did a small number of people do most of the work?” 220/354 did both bug fixing and new feature development 47 committers contributed 80% of the deltas End result: a lot more top committers in FreeBSD than in Apache © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 9 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: Questionnaire Question 4: “Where did the code contributors work in the code? Was strict code ownership enforced on a file or module level?” Contributors were free to work on all parts of code – ownership was not enforced 30% of files were only changed by one developer © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 10 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: Questionnaire Question 5: “What is the defect density of FreeBSD code?” Defect density is similar to that of Apache, and is lower than commercial products. © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 11 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: H1 “Open source developments will have a core of developers who control the code base, and will create approximately 80 percent or more of the new functionality. If this core group uses only informal ad hoc means of coordinating their work, the group will be no larger than 10 to 15 people.” Core group for FreeBSD consisted of 36 people Core group for FreeBSD only wrote 47% of code Edited hypothesis: Core developers (< 15) will control the direction of the project while a larger group of top developers (< 50) will contribute approximately 80% of the code base, and their sum is less than 25% of all developers. Spirit of this edited hypothesis matches the spirit of the original one, so hypothesis is confirmed © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 12 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: H2 “If a project is so large that more than 10 to 15 people are required to complete 80 percent of the code in the desired time frame, then other mechanisms, rather than just informal ad hoc arrangements, will be required in order to coordinate the work. These mechanisms may include one or more of the following: explicit development processes, individual or group code ownership, and required inspections.” The high number of top committers in FreeBSD required more mechanisms for coordinating work than were needed in Apache; however, these methods were informal and not enforced. H2 should be edited to suggest that more mechanisms are needed, but they don’t need to be formal. © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 13 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: H3 “In successful open source developments, a group larger by an order of magnitude than the core will repair defects, and a yet larger group (by another order of magnitude) will report problems.” This hypothesis holds for FreeBSD. Could other organizational structures also work? Is a good organizational structure necessary for success? © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 14 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: H4 “Open source developments that have a strong core of developers but never achieve large numbers of contributors beyond that core will be able to create new functionality but will fail because of a lack of resources devoted to finding and repairing defects.” FreeBSD had many contributors, so H4 could not be evaluated. © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 15 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: H5 “Defect density in open source releases will generally be lower than commercial code that has only been feature-tested, that is, received a comparable level of testing.” FreeBSD supports this hypothesis. This hypothesis refers to unstable OSS releases (those that have only been feature-tested), so the authors extend the hypothesis to include stable releases as follows: “Defect density in OSS releases will be lower than commercial code that has only been feature-tested. If an OSS has a mechanism to separate unstable code from stable code or “official” releases, then the defect density of the stable code releases will be equivalent to that of commercial code after release.” © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 16 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: H6 “In successful open source developments, the developers will also be users of the software.” Developers of FreeBSD were also users, so H6 holds true. Can OSS developers who are not users be successful if they listen carefully to user feedback, i.e. is it necessary for OSS developers to also be users? © 2006, Dewayne E Perry EE 382V – Spring 08 17 Collaborative Software Design and Development Open Source Systems 4 The FreeBSD Project: H7 “OSS developments exhibit very rapid responses to customer problems.” The authors didn’t have access to data about the responsiveness of FreeBSD developments to customer problems, so H7 could not
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