How to Gather Metrics on FLOSS Projects
Abstract
In this half-day tutorial, participants will gain hands-on exposure to
key technologies for data collection about open source projects. The
tutorial will begin with reviews of the main source code repositories,
including popular code forges such as Sourceforge, and techniques for
collecting data directly from the forges as well as from aggregation
projects such as FLOSSmole. The tutorial will then discuss tools
designed for analyzing the data found on forges, such as CVSAnalY,
Pyternity, and SLOCCount, among others. Most importantly, participants
will have a chance to analyze data with the help of the presenters.
Teams of participants will solve open-ended analysis problems
collaboratively and in real-time during the workshop. Finally,
participants will have opportunities to discuss with the presenters what
sort of data collection and analysis tools they would like to see built
in the future.
Target audience: Researchers,
developers, managers.
Keywords: Data mining,
metrics, quantitative, software engineering, data collection.
Program:
- Briefly introduce overall problem of data collection
- Introduce tools: FLOSSmole, CVSAnalY, Pyternity, SLOCCount, etc
- Distribute data sets, pose problems for real-time assessment
- Share results
- Discuss future prospects
Short Biography
Megan Conklin is an assistant professor
in the Department of Computing Sciences at Elon University. Her primary
research focus is on data mining and large database systems,
particularly for software engineering data. She was co-organizer of the
2006 WoPDaSD workshop at the International Conference on Software
Engineering (along with Gregorio Robles and Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona).
She has published a number of papers on tools for analyzing open source
projects, and has spoken about open source data collection at such
diverse events as the Mining Software Repositories workshop at ICSE and
the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. She has a PhD in computer science
from Nova Southeastern University.
Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona teaches and
researches at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Mostoles (Spain). His
research interests include libre software engineering, and in particular
quantitative measures of libre software development and distributed
tools for collaboration in libre software projects. In this area, he has
published several papers, and is participating in some international
research projects (more info at http://libresoft.urjc.es). He is also
one of the promoters of the idea of a European masters program on libre
software, and has specific interest in education relating to that area.
Gregorio Robles is Associate Professor at
the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain. He earned a degree in
electrical engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
(studying his last year and submitting his master thesis at the
Technical University of Berlin, DE) and obtained his PhD in 2006. His
research work is centered in the study of libre software development
from an engineering point of view, especially with regard to
quantitative and empirical issues. Related, non-technical matters have
also been of interest: volunteer-driven software development and social
network analyses of the libre software phenomenon. He has developed or
collaborated in the design of programmes to automate the analysis of
libre software and the tools used to produce them. He was also involved
in the FLOSS study on libre software financed by the European Commission
IST programme, and was involved in other European-funded projects such
as CALIBRE or FLOSSWorld. He has also had the opportunity to attend the
following universities as a research visitor: Wirtschaftsuniversität
Wien (AT, 2 months), MERIT/University of Maastricht (NL, 4 months), the
University of Lincoln (UK, 3 months) and the Technical University Munich
(DE, 5 months).
