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A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack
Technical collaboration between multiple contributors is a natural phenomenon in distributed open source software development projects. Macro-collaboration, where each code commit is attributed to a single collaborator, has been extensively studied in the research literature. This is much less the c...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer US
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9206143/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35757446 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10664-022-10167-w |
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author | Foundjem, Armstrong Constantinou, Eleni Mens, Tom Adams, Bram |
author_facet | Foundjem, Armstrong Constantinou, Eleni Mens, Tom Adams, Bram |
author_sort | Foundjem, Armstrong |
collection | PubMed |
description | Technical collaboration between multiple contributors is a natural phenomenon in distributed open source software development projects. Macro-collaboration, where each code commit is attributed to a single collaborator, has been extensively studied in the research literature. This is much less the case for so-called micro-collaboration practices, in which multiple authors contribute to the same commit. To support such practices, GitLab and GitHub started supporting social coding mechanisms such as the “Co-Authored-By:” trailers in commit messages, which, in turn, enable to empirically study such micro-collaboration. In order to understand the mechanisms, benefits and limitations of micro-collaboration, this article provides an exemplar case study of collaboration practices in the OpenStack ecosystem. Following a mixed-method research approach we provide qualitative evidence through a thematic and content analysis of semi-structured interviews with 16 OpenStack contributors. We contrast their perception with quantitative evidence gained by statistical analysis of the git commit histories ([Formula: see text] 1M commits) and Gerrit code review histories ([Formula: see text] 631K change sets and [Formula: see text] 2M patch sets) of 1,804 OpenStack project repositories over a 9-year period. Our findings provide novel empirical insights to practitioners to promote micro-collaborative coding practices, and to academics to conduct further research towards understanding and automating the micro-collaboration process. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9206143 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Springer US |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-92061432022-06-21 A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack Foundjem, Armstrong Constantinou, Eleni Mens, Tom Adams, Bram Empir Softw Eng Article Technical collaboration between multiple contributors is a natural phenomenon in distributed open source software development projects. Macro-collaboration, where each code commit is attributed to a single collaborator, has been extensively studied in the research literature. This is much less the case for so-called micro-collaboration practices, in which multiple authors contribute to the same commit. To support such practices, GitLab and GitHub started supporting social coding mechanisms such as the “Co-Authored-By:” trailers in commit messages, which, in turn, enable to empirically study such micro-collaboration. In order to understand the mechanisms, benefits and limitations of micro-collaboration, this article provides an exemplar case study of collaboration practices in the OpenStack ecosystem. Following a mixed-method research approach we provide qualitative evidence through a thematic and content analysis of semi-structured interviews with 16 OpenStack contributors. We contrast their perception with quantitative evidence gained by statistical analysis of the git commit histories ([Formula: see text] 1M commits) and Gerrit code review histories ([Formula: see text] 631K change sets and [Formula: see text] 2M patch sets) of 1,804 OpenStack project repositories over a 9-year period. Our findings provide novel empirical insights to practitioners to promote micro-collaborative coding practices, and to academics to conduct further research towards understanding and automating the micro-collaboration process. Springer US 2022-06-18 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC9206143/ /pubmed/35757446 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10664-022-10167-w Text en © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022 This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. |
spellingShingle | Article Foundjem, Armstrong Constantinou, Eleni Mens, Tom Adams, Bram A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack |
title | A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack |
title_full | A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack |
title_fullStr | A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack |
title_full_unstemmed | A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack |
title_short | A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack |
title_sort | mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in openstack |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9206143/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35757446 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10664-022-10167-w |
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