Architecture Information Communication in Two OSS Projects: the Why, Who, When, and What
release_womwgeprefd4vevjorl6gdqbb4
by
Tingting Bi, Wei Ding, Peng Liang, Antony Tang
2021
Abstract
Architecture information is vital for Open Source Software (OSS) development,
and mailing list is one of the widely used channels for developers to share and
communicate architecture information. This work investigates the nature of
architecture information communication (i.e., why, who, when, and what) by OSS
developers via developer mailing lists. We employed a multiple case study
approach to extract and analyze the architecture information communication from
the developer mailing lists of two OSS projects, ArgoUML and Hibernate, during
their development life-cycle of over 18 years. Our main findings are: (a)
architecture negotiation and interpretation are the two main reasons (i.e.,
why) of architecture communication; (b) the amount of architecture information
communicated in developer mailing lists decreases after the first stable
release (i.e., when); (c) architecture communications centered around a few
core developers (i.e., who); (d) and the most frequently communicated
architecture elements (i.e., what) are Architecture Rationale and Architecture
Model. There are a few similarities of architecture communication between the
two OSS projects. Such similarities point to how OSS developers naturally
gravitate towards the four aspects of architecture communication in OSS
development.
In text/plain
format
Archived Files and Locations
application/pdf 1.5 MB
file_ygnn2vjaxjhwbpnyhfcql2lxxe
|
arxiv.org (repository) web.archive.org (webarchive) |
2107.01446v1
access all versions, variants, and formats of this works (eg, pre-prints)