Abstract
Developing software in the free/open source software (F/OSS) way is fundamentally different from the conventional, closed, team-based, single-owner software project. As a consequence, managing a F/OSS project is done in a quite different way, emphasizing on people and community coordination and organization. Management organization may take extremely distant forms: absolute monarchies, oligarchies, or open source democracies, with community members voting to decide project evolution. On the other hand, not all F/OSS projects are based on pure voluntarism. Many such projects are sponsored by firms and are managed in their own way. In addition, certain extreme project transformations, such as forking, occur frequently in F/OSS. Human resource management (e.g., team building) and decision making (e.g., project cancellation) are also done in a completely different way. This chapter focuses on how human resource management and project organization are handled in F/OSS today. On the other hand, there are several areas in which, given enough research and experimentation, new tools may be provided to assist informed, successful F/OSS management, aiming to help both experienced and novice F/OSS coordinators. The chapter attempts to foresee how measurement, simulation, and antipattern techniques might help F/OSS managers in the future.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/, EU open source reuse repository for public administrations.
- 7.
http://brlcad.org/, advertised by U.S. Army as the world’s oldest open source software.
- 8.
- 9.
Male managers in FLOSS are an order of a magnitude more common, thus we use from now on.
- 10.
This is evident if we look at many widely known traditional process models, such as the Rational Unified Process or Boehm’s spiral model.
- 11.
LifeRay Inc. chooses what features proposed by the community to develop, but encourages developers to do the same see http://www.liferay.com/community/ideas.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
References
Abdel-Hamid T, Madnick S (1991) Software project dynamics: an integrated approach. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs
Aberdour M (2007) Achieving quality in open source software. IEEE Softw 24(1):58–64
Advani D, Hassoun Y, Counsell S (2005) Refactoring trends across N versions of N Java open source systems: an empirical study. Technical report, University of London
Antoniades I, Stamelos I, Angelis L, Bleris G (2002) A novel simulation model for the development process of open source software projects. Softw Process Improv Pract 7(3–4):173–188
Aspeli M (2005) A model of a mature open source project. MSc Thesis, London School of Economics
Beck K (1999) Extreme programming explained: embrace change. Addison-Wesley, Boston
Brown W, Malveau R, McCormick H, Thomas S, Hudson T (eds) (2000) Anti-patterns in project management. Wiley, New York
Capra E, Francalanci C, Merlo F, Rossi-Lamastra C (2011) Firms’ involvement in open source projects: a trade-off between software structural quality and popularity. J Syst Softw 84(1):144–161
Cerone A, Settas D (2011) Using antipatterns to improve the quality of FLOSS development. Fifth international workshop on foundations and techniques for open source software certification
Coverity (2013) 2012 coverity scan report. Available from http://softwareintegrity.coverity.com/. Released 7 May 2013
Crowston K, Howison J, Annabi H (2006) Information systems success in free and open source software development: theory and measures. Softw Process Improv Pract 11(2):123–148
Evangelopoulos N, Sidorova A, Fotopoulos S, Chengalur-Smith I (2009) Determining process death based on censored activity data. Commun Stat Simul Comput 37(8):1647–1662
Feller J, Fitzgerald B (2002) Understanding Open Source Software Development. Addison-Wesley, Boston
Fontana F, Braione P, Zanoni M (2012) Automatic detection of bad smells in code: an experimental assessment. J Object Technol 11 (2):5:1–38
Holck J, Jørgensen N (2005) Do not check in on red: control meets anarchy in two open source projects. In: Koch S (ed) Free/open source software development. IGI, Hershey, pp 1–26
IST (2014) Special issue on human factors in software development. In: Amrit C, Daneva M (eds) Inf Softw Technol (Forthcoming)
Kakarontzas G. Stamelos I, Skalistis S, Naskos A (2012) Extracting components from open source: the component adaptation environment (COPE) approach. In: EUROMI- CRO-SEAA conference, pp 192–199
Liu B (2010) Sentiment analysis and subjectivity. In: Indurkhya N, Damerau FJ (eds) Handbook of natural language processing. Now Publishers
Madey G, Freeh V, Tynan R (2005) Modeling the free/open source software community: a quantitative investigation. In: Koch S (ed) Free/open source software development. IGI, Hershey, pp 203–221
McCabe T (1976) A complexity measure. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 2(4):308–320
Michlmayr M (2004) Managing volunteer activity in free software projects. In: Proceedings of the 2004 USENIX annual technical conference, Freenix Track, pp 93–102
Midha V, Palvia P (2012) Factors affecting the success of open source software. J Syst Softw 85(4):895–905
Munoz-Cornejo G, Seaman C, Gunes Koru A (2008) An empirical investigation into the adoption of open source software in hospitals. Int J Healthc Inf Syst Inform 3(3):16–37
Querol del Amo M (2007) Open source software: critical review of scientific literature and other sources. MSc Thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Raymond E (1999) The cathedral and the bazaar. O’Reilly Media, Cambridge
Samoladas I, Gousios G, Spinellis D, Stamelos I (2008) 4th International conference on open source systems, pp 237–248
Samoladas I, Angelis L, Stamelos I (2010) Survival analysis on the duration of open source projects. Inf Softw Technol 52(9):902–922
Sandred J (2002) Managing open source projects. Wiley, New York
Sharma S, Sugumaran V, Rajagopalan B (2002) A framework for creating hybrid-open source software communities. Inf Syst J 12:7–25
Smith N, Capiluppi A, Fernández-Ramil J (2006) Agent-based simulation of open source evolution. Softw Process Improv Pract 11(4):423–434
Sowe S, Stamelos I, Angelis L (2006) Identifying knowledge brokers that yield software engineering knowledge in OSS projects. Inf Softw Technol 48(11):1025–1033
Thomas D, Hunt A (2004) Open source ecosystems. IEEE Softw 21(4):89–91
Wynn D (2003) Organizational structure of open source projects: a life cycle approach. In: 7th Annual conference of the southern association for information systems
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stamelos, I. (2014). Management and Coordination of Free/Open Source Projects. In: Ruhe, G., Wohlin, C. (eds) Software Project Management in a Changing World. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55035-5_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55035-5_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-55034-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-55035-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)