Computer Science

Global Software Engineering has become a standard in today’s software industry. Research in distributed software development poses severe challenges that are due to the spatial and temporal distribution of the actors, as well as to language, intercultural and organizational aspects. These challenges occur in addition to “traditional” challenges of the domain itself in large-scale software projects, like coordination and communication issues, requirements volatily, lack of domain knowledge, among others. While several authors have reported empirical studies of global software development projects, the methodological difficulties and challenges of this type of studies have not been sufficiently discussed. In this paper, we share our experiences of collecting and analysing qualitative data in the context of Global Software Engineering projects. We discuss strategies for gaining access to field sites, building trust and documenting distributed and complex work practices in the context of several research projects we have conducted in the past 9 years. The experiences described in this paper illustrate the need to deal with fundamental problems, such as understanding local languages and different cultures, observing synchronous interaction, or dealing with barriers imposed by political conflicts between the sites. Based on our findings, we discuss some practical implications and strategies that can be used by other researchers and provide some recommendations for future research in methodological aspects of Global Software Engineering.

This paper describes Ariadne, a Java tool for the Eclipse IDE, that links technical and social dependencies. Ariadne is based on the observation that technical dependencies among software components create social dependencies among the software developers implementing these components. We describe our approach for creating technical, socio-technical and social dependencies from a software project. We describe possible uses of our approach and tool as well as discuss briefly related work.

Open source projects are typical examples of successful distributed software development projects. Understanding how coordination in these projects takes place can provide important lessons to Software Engineering researchers and practitioners. This understanding has been achieved using different research methods, including, surveys, case studies and social network analysis. However, to conduct these studies each researcher needs to build his own infra-structure from the scratch, a time consuming and error-prone task. This paper aims to alleviate this problem by describing an environment, the OSSNetwork, which allows the automatic data collection of open source repositories. Data collected by the OSSNetwork is aimed to support the construction, visualization, and analysis of social networks. This environment is extensible, therefore facilitating empirical studies of open source projects.

Several researchers have been investigating open-source projects and communities due to their characteristics and claimed advantages. In particular, researchers have studied collaboration and coordination of open source software developers using an approach known as social network analysis. This approach has provided important insights into the phenomenon of collaborative software production in open/free software projects since the networks studied (email, chat communication, cvs logs, etc) represent different relations between software developers. However, researchers have not focused on the combined study of these networks. That is exactly the goal of this paper, to combine multiple social networks to study open-source projects. That is, to find out how the different networks in which open source developers are embedded influences or is related to each other. We describe our approach and some initial results using the jEdit and ZK1 projects as examples. Resumo. Diversos pesquisadores têm investigado projetos de software livre e as comunidades devido às suas características e vantagens aclamadas. Em particular, pesquisadores estudaram colaboração e coordenação de projetos de software livre usando uma abordagem conhecida como análise de redes sociais. Esta abordagem forneceu importantes idéias sobre o fenômeno da produção colaborativa de software em projetos de software livre, já que estas redes estudadas (email, comunicação do bate-papo, registros de cvs, etc.) representam diferentes relações entre os colaboradores do software. Entretanto, os pesquisadores não focalizaram no estudo combinado destas redes. Este é exatamente o objetivo deste artigo, combinar redes múltiplas sociais para estudar projetos de software livre. Isto é, para descobrir como as diferentes redes de colaboradores são influenciadas e como influenciam umas às outras. Nós descreveremos nossa abordagem e alguns resultados iniciais usando o projeto jEdit e o ZK1 como exemplos.