Communication in open source software development mailing lists

Open source software (OSS) development teams use electronic means, such as emails, instant messaging, or forums, to conduct open and public discussions. Researchers investigated mailing lists considering them as a hub for project communication. Prior work focused on specific aspects of emails, for e...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in2013 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) pp. 277 - 286
Main Authors Guzzi, Anja, Bacchelli, Alberto, Lanza, Michele, Pinzger, Martin, van Deursen, Arie
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.05.2013
Subjects
Buildings
Data mining
Electronic mail
Linux
Software
Sorting
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Open source software (OSS) development teams use electronic means, such as emails, instant messaging, or forums, to conduct open and public discussions. Researchers investigated mailing lists considering them as a hub for project communication. Prior work focused on specific aspects of emails, for example the handling of patches, traceability concerns, or social networks. This led to insights pertaining to the investigated aspects, but not to a comprehensive view of what developers communicate about. Our objective is to increase the understanding of development mailing lists communication. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed a sample of 506 email threads from the development mailing list of a major OSS project, Lucene. Our investigation reveals that implementation details are discussed only in about 35% of the threads, and that a range of other topics is discussed. Moreover, core developers participate in less than 75% of the threads. We observed that the development mailing list is not the main player in OSS project communication, as it also includes other channels such as the issue repository.
ISBN:1479903450
9781479903450
ISSN:2160-1852
DOI:10.1109/MSR.2013.6624039