The factors that affect the performance of open source software development – the perspective of social capital and expertise integration

Drawing on social capital theory, we develop a theoretical model aiming to explore how open source software (OSS) project effectiveness (in terms of team size, team effort and team's level of completion) is affected by expertise integration. This in turn is influenced by three types of social capital – relational capital, cognitive capital and structural capital. In addition, this study also examines two moderating effects – the impact of technical complexity on the relationship between cognitive capital and expertise integration, and of task interdependence on the relationship between expertise integration and task completion. Through a field survey of 160 OSS members from five Taiwanese communities, there is support for some of the proposed hypotheses. Both reciprocity and centrality affect expertise integration as expected, but the influence of commitment and cognitive capital (including expertise and tenure) on expertise integration is not significant. Finally, expertise integration affects both team size and team effort, which in turn jointly influence task completion. This research contributes to advancing theoretical understanding of the effectiveness of free OSS development as well as providing OSS practitioners with insight into how to leverage social capital for improving the performance of OSS development.     

Beyond free software: An exploration of the business value of strategic open source

The phenomenon of open source software (OSS) has been well studied from the software development perspective, but it has received much less attention from the perspective of business value. Nevertheless, OSS, when viewed as a value creation process rather than ‘free’ software, provides businesses with value through access to knowledge and innovation capacity resident in online communities. This conceptualisation, which we label ‘strategic open source’ requires firms to rethink their strategy and processes as there is a shift in focus from ownership to openness and collaboration with external parties. Nonetheless, the emergence of OSS poses a puzzle for conceptions of organisational theory. Therefore, a theorising process is needed in order to develop a deeper understanding of how value is created and captured with OSS. Using a field study of eleven European firms, this paper explores the creation and capture of business value from strategic open source. The findings reveal that while decision makers look to open innovation initiatives like OSS for value creation and capture, there is still a desire to remain self reliant, resulting in collaborative design (of external innovations) rather than collaborative decision making with value network partners in relation to how such innovations would help create and capture value within firms.     

Volunteers’ involvement in online community based software development

We sought to gain understanding of voluntary developers’ involvement in open source software (OSS) projects. Data were collected from voluntary developers working on open source projects. Our findings indicated that a voluntary developer's involvement was very important to his or her performance and that involvement was dependent on individual motivations (personal software needs, reputation and skills gaining expectation, enjoyment in open source coding) and project community factors (leadership effectiveness, interpersonal relationship, community ideology). Our work contributes theoretically and empirically to the body of OSS research and has practical implications for OSS project management.     

A critical look at open source

In recent years, open source software - more properly, free and open source software - has emerged as one popular solution to the so-called "software crisis". Advocates regard F/OSS as an agile, practice-led initiative that addresses three key issues namely cost, time scale and quality. F/OSS products are usually freely available for public download. The collaborative, parallel efforts of globally distributed developers allow many F/OSS products to be developed much more quickly than conventional software. Many F/OSS offerings are recognized for their high standards of reliability, efficiency, and robustness; products such as GNU/Linux, Apache, and Bind have become "category killers" stifling the incentive to develop any competing products.     

A framework for creating hybrid-open source software communities

Abstract The open source software (OSS) model is a fundamentally new and revolutionary way to develop software. The success of the OSS model is also setting the stage for a structural change in the software industry; it is beginning to transform software industry from manufacturing to a service industry. Despite the success of the OSS model, for‐profit organizations are having difficulty building a business model around the open source paradigm. Whereas there are some isolated empirical studies, little rigorous research has been done on how traditional organizations can implement and benefit from OSS practices. This research explores how organizations can foster an environment similar to OSS to manage their software development efforts to reap its numerous advantages. Drawing on organizational theory, we develop a framework that guides the creation and management of a hybrid‐OSS community within an organization. We discuss the implications of this framework and suggest areas for future research.     

The Types,Roles, and Practices of Documentation in Data Analytics Open Source Software Libraries

Computational research and data analytics increasingly relies on complex ecosystems of open source software (OSS) “libraries” – curated collections of reusable code that programmers import to perform a specific task. Software documentation for these libraries is crucial in helping programmers/analysts know what libraries are available and how to use them. Yet documentation for open source software libraries is widely considered low-quality. This article is a collaboration between CSCW researchers and contributors to data analytics OSS libraries, based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews. We examine several issues around the formats, practices, and challenges around documentation in these largely volunteer-based projects. There are many different kinds and formats of documentation that exist around such libraries, which play a variety of educational, promotional, and organizational roles. The work behind documentation is similarly multifaceted, including writing, reviewing, maintaining, and organizing documentation. Different aspects of documentation work require contributors to have different sets of skills and overcome various social and technical barriers. Finally, most of our interviewees do not report high levels of intrinsic enjoyment for doing documentation work (compared to writing code). Their motivation is affected by personal and project-specific factors, such as the perceived level of credit for doing documentation work versus more ‘technical’ tasks like adding new features or fixing bugs. In studying documentation work for data analytics OSS libraries, we gain a new window into the changing practices of data-intensive research, as well as help practitioners better understand how to support this often invisible and infrastructural work in their projects.     

从计算机辅助翻译到协同翻译

由于机器翻译系统的译文质量仍难以达到实用化要求,计算机辅助翻译技术逐渐成为研究热点,并且取得了很好的实际效果,大大提高了翻译产业的生产率。随着辅助翻译规模的不断扩大,多名在空间上分散的用户被组织起来共同完成一项翻译任务已成为普遍现象,这种新的翻译模式称为协同翻译。该文对计算机辅助翻译和协同翻译技术进行综述,首先从辅助译文生成、译后编辑和系统反馈学习等方面介绍了计算机辅助翻译技术的常用方法和研究进展,随后讨论了计算机辅助翻译与协同翻译之间的联系和区别,分析了协同翻译技术所面临的主要问题,并介绍了现有研究的解决方法。最后对协同翻译的未来发展方向进行了展望。     

Building Effective Project Teams

Most IS managers know that managing a project to its successful completion is not an easy task. Conflicts among team members often delay a project's schedule and can ruin the team's morale. Although most managers usually follow the traditional, authoritative style of management to control their team members, this style is no longer considered as effective as the more contemporary, collaborative approach. This article describes how IS managers can manage their projects more effectively by creating collaborative project teams.     

Using open source software in product development: a primer

There are important legal aspects involved in using open source software in commercial products. Here are answers to common questions on how to handle these issues to mitigate risk. The use of open source software in industrial products is growing rapidly because its many advantages are well known. However although we in industry understand liability and intellectual-property-right risks fairly well, the implication of OSS-related legal and managerial issues are new to many of us. Legal aspects can vary greatly from one piece of OSS to another depending on the license scheme used. We discuss the major legal aspects and risks in using OSS and how to mitigate them in product development. We've ordered the information in a top-down approach, starting with a definition of OSS, its benefits, and then some risks and experiences with managing it in software engineering practice.     

Empirical study of open source software selection for adoption,based on software quality characteristics

Currently, open source software (OSS) products have started to become popular in the market as an alternative to traditional proprietary or closed source software. Governments and organizations are beginning to adopt OSS on a large scale and several governmental initiatives have encouraged the use of OSS in the private sector. One major issue for the government and private sector is the selection of appropriate OSS. This paper uses new internal quality characteristics for selecting OSS that can be added to the dimensions of DeLone and McLean information systems’ model. Through this study, the quality characteristics are organized in a two level hierarchy, which list characteristics and sub-characteristics that are interconnected with three main dimensions: system quality, information quality and service quality. These characteristic dimensions are tailored to the criteria having been built from literature study and standard for software quality and guidelines. This paper presents case study results of applying the proposed quality characteristic on eight different open source software that are divided between open source network tools and learning management systems.     

Achieving Quality in Open-Source Software

The open source software community has published a substantial body of research on OSS quality. Focusing on this peer-reviewed body of work lets us draw conclusions from empirical data rather than rely on the large volume of evangelical opinion that has historically dominated this field. This body of published research has become much more critical and objective in its efforts to understand OSS development, and a consensus has emerged on the key components of high-quality OSS delivery. This article reviews this body of research and draws out lessons learned, investigating how the approaches used to deliver high-quality OSS differ from, and can be incorporated into, closed-source software development     

Are two heads always better than one? Differential effects of collaboration on students�� computer-supported learning in mathematics

While some studies found positive effects of collaboration on student learning in mathematics, others found none or even negative effects. This study evaluates whether the varying impact of collaboration can be explained by differences in the type of knowledge that is promoted by the instruction. If the instructional material requires students to reason with mathematical concepts, collaboration may increase students’ learning outcome as it promotes mutual elaboration. If, however, the instructional material is focused on practicing procedures, collaboration may result in task distribution and thus reduce practice opportunities necessary for procedural skill fluency. To evaluate differential influences of collaboration, we compared four conditions: individual vs. collaborative learning with conceptual instructional material, and individual vs. collaborative learning with procedural instructional material. The instruction was computer-supported and provided adaptive feedback. We analyzed the effect of the conditions on several levels: Logfiles of students’ problem-solving actions and video-recordings enabled a detailed analysis of performance and learning processes during instruction. In addition, a post-test assessed individual knowledge acquisition. We found that collaboration improved performance during the learning phase in both the conceptual and the procedural condition; however, conceptual and procedural material had a differential effect on the quality of student collaboration: Conceptual material promoted mutual elaboration; procedural material promoted task distribution and ineffective learning behaviors. Consequently, collaboration positively influenced conceptual knowledge acquisition, while no positive effect on procedural knowledge acquisition was found. We discuss limitations of our study, address methodological implications, and suggest practical implications for the school context.     

Adoption of open source software in software-intensive organizations – A systematic literature review

ContextOpen source software (OSS) is changing the way organizations develop, acquire, use, and commercialize software.ObjectiveThis paper seeks to identify how organizations adopt OSS, classify the literature according to these ways of adopting OSS, and with a focus on software development evaluate the research on adoption of OSS in organizations.MethodBased on the systematic literature review method we reviewed publications from 24 journals and seven conference and workshop proceedings, published between 1998 and 2008. From a population of 24,289 papers, we identified 112 papers that provide empirical evidence on how organizations actually adopt OSS.ResultsWe show that adopting OSS involves more than simply using OSS products. We moreover provide a classification framework consisting of six distinctly different ways in which organizations adopt OSS. This framework is used to illustrate some of the opportunities and challenges organizations meet when approaching OSS, to show that OSS can be adopted successfully in different ways, and to organize and review existing research. We find that existing research on OSS adoption does not sufficiently describe the context of the organizations studied, and it fails to benefit fully from related research fields. While existing research covers a large number of topics, it contains very few closely related studies. To aid this situation, we offer directions for future research.ConclusionThe implications of our findings are twofold. On the one hand, practitioners should embrace the many opportunities OSS offers, but consciously evaluate the consequences of adopting it in their own context. They may use our framework and the success stories provided by the literature in their own evaluations. On the other hand, researchers should align their work, and perform more empirical research on topics that are important to organizations. Our framework may be used to position this research and to describe the context of the organization they are studying.     

An HCI method to improve the human performance reduced by local-lag mechanism

Local-lag mechanism can maintain consistency for replicated continuous applications, but with a tradeoff of adding delay to local operations. To relieve the negative effects of the delay, this paper proposes an HCI method named echo. With the help of the echo method users can immediately perceive the results of their operations and how large the lag is. In order to evaluate the proposed method, a desktop collaborative virtual environment (CVE) system and a virtual object control task were employed to study the effects of the echo method on human performance (including task completion time, error count, and interaction quality). Experimental results indicate that when the lag exceeds 100 ms the echo method can improve human performance with the effects becoming more evident when a larger lag is used.     

Striking a balance between trust and control in a virtual organization: a content analysis of open source software case studies

Abstract. Many organization theorists have predicted the emergence of the networked or virtual firm as a model for the design of future organizations. Researchers have also emphasized the importance of trust as a necessary condition for ensuring the success of virtual organizations. This paper examines the open source software (OSS) 'movement' as an example of a virtual organization and proposes a model that runs contrary to the belief that trust is critical for virtual organizations. Instead, I argue that various control mechanisms can ensure the effective performance of autonomous agents who participate in virtual organizations. Borrowing from the theory of the 'McDonaldization' of society, I argue that, given a set of practices to ensure the control, efficiency, predictability and calculability of processes and outcomes in virtual organizations, effective performance may occur in the absence of trust. As support for my argument, I employ content analysis to examine a set of published case studies of OSS projects. My results show that, although that trust is rarely mentioned, ensuring control is an important criterion for effective performance within OSS projects. The case studies feature few references to other dimensions of McDonaldization (efficiency, predictability and calculability), however, and I conclude that the OSS movement relies on many other forms of social control and self-control, which are often unacknowledged in OSS projects. Through these implicit forms of control, OSS projects are able to secure the cooperation of the autonomous agents that participate in project teams. I conclude by extrapolating from these case studies to other virtual organizations.     

A Methodological Framework for Socio-Cognitive Analyses of Collaborative Design of Open Source Software

Open Source Software (OSS) development challenges traditional software engineering practices. In particular, OSS projects are managed by a large number of volunteers, working freely on the tasks they choose to undertake. OSS projects also rarely rely on explicit system-level design, or on project plans or schedules. Moreover, OSS developers work in arbitrary locations and collaborate almost exclusively over the Internet, using simple tools such as email and software code tracking databases (e.g. CVS).All the characteristics above make OSS development akin to weaving a tapestry of heterogeneous components. The OSS design process relies on various types of actors: people with prescribed roles, but also elements coming from a variety of information spaces (such as email and software code). The objective of our research is to understand the specific hybrid weaving accomplished by the actors of this distributed, collective design process. This, in turn, challenges traditional methodologies used to understand distributed software engineering: OSS development is simply too “fibrous” to lend itself well to analysis under a single methodological lens.In this paper, we describe the methodological framework we articulated to analyze collaborative design in the Open Source world. Our framework focuses on the links between the heterogeneous components of a project’s hybrid network. We combine ethnography, text mining, and socio-technical network analysis and visualization to understand OSS development in its totality. This way, we are able to simultaneously consider the social, technical, and cognitive aspects of OSS development. We describe our methodology in detail, and discuss its implications for future research on distributed collective practices.The order of the co-authors names is not significant.     

Empowering the users? A critical textual analysis of the role of users in open source software development

This paper outlines a critical, textual approach for the analysis of the relationship between different actors in information technology (IT) production, and further concretizes the approach in the analysis of the role of users in the open source software (OSS) development literature. Central concepts of the approach are outlined. The role of users is conceptualized as reader involvement aiming to contribute to the configuration of the reader (to how users and the parameters for their work practices are defined in OSS texts). Afterwards, OSS literature addressing reader involvement is critically reviewed. In OSS context, the OSS writers as readers configure the reader and other readers are assumed to be capable of and interested in commenting the texts. A lack of OSS research on non-technical reader involvement is identified. Furthermore, not only are the OSS readers configured, but so are OSS writers. In OSS context while writers may be empowered, this clearly does not apply to the non-technical OSS readers. Implication for research and practice are discussed.

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基于CSCW的集成系统的研究

CSCW系统柔性关键技术之一就是如何集成系统，使集成系统不仅支持业务的协同处理，而且具有柔性，以支持机构改革和适应市场进行快速重组。提出了一种CSCW环境下的基于业务划分的任务处理单元，通过消息驱动机制实现同步协作，依赖工作流机制集成系统的方案以很好地支持有协同工作需求的企业业务管理的完成。     

Building Effective Project Teams

Most IS managers know that managing a project to its successful completion is not an easy task. Conflicts among team members often delay a project's schedule and can ruin the team's morale. Although most managers usually follow the traditional, authoritative style of management to control their team members, this style is no longer considered as effective as the more contemporary, collaborative approach. This article describes how IS managers can manage their projects more effectively by creating collaborative project teams.