1. Trends in Open Source Research Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona

2. (CC) 2000-2010 Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona.
Some rights reserved.
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3. The differences of researching FLOSS
“FLOSS research matches well the traditional scientific practices”

4. Researching FLOSS: data sources
Empirical research is based on data sources
Traditional systems: most data is not public, only available under NDA
FLOSS systems: most data is public, and easily available
Research on products, procedures and actors gets a new meaning

5. Usual data sources Software releases Source code management
Issue tracking
Mailing lists, forums
But also interviews, polls, etc.
Most processes and outputs are public!

6. What does that mean for research
A new paradigm in software engineering research :
Research can be traced to the data sources
Research can be checked in all the details
Research can be repeated for many (many) projects
Research is reproduceable!

7. But there are open issues
Still few works take advantage
New procedures and standards for reproduceability needed
Not only data sources: tools, research methods have to be detailed and public
Reproduction of existing research have to be incentivized

8. A way forward : RoRs RoR: Repositories of Repositories
Data for large quantities of projects
Data for different kinds of repositories
Separate data retrieval from data analysis
Standard datasets, large quantity of data easily available
Examples: FLOSSMetrics, FLOSSMole

9. Some references
Gregorio Robles: “Replicating MSR: A study of the potential replicability of papers published in the Mining Software Repositories proceedings”. MSR 2010:
Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, Megan Squire, Daniel Izquierdo-Cortazar: “Repositories with Public Data about Software Development”, IJOSSP, vol. 2, issue 2, 2010