[LLVMdev] Codeface: Open-Source Developer Study

[Sean Silva]

Hi,

I started doing the survey, but I stopped when it required manually listing
the developers that I collaborated with and the nature of the collaboration
(and it seems that participating in a review or discussion thread with that
developer requires listing them).

I believe that this is an overly onerous requirement, since the number of
developers that I would have to list would be very large and it would take
me a long time to inventory the nature of the collaboration. For example,
on just one page of my "sent" email I can see at least 10 developers that I
would have to manually list and analyze the nature of the thread. I assume
that most LLVM developers would be in a similar boat.

For this survey to be more realistic, I would recommend that you mine the
mailing list archives (and maybe also SVN and bugzilla) to develop
preliminary information, then use that to pre-populate the contents of
question 2 (after the survey-taker has given their emails); you also may
want to present a listing of thread titles with the ability to click
through to show the mailing list thread for further inspection.

Also keep in mind that a number of us have been (or still are) involved
with LLVM from multiple email addresses, so the system must be able to take
this into account. For example, a survey-taker should be able to specify
multiple email addresses that are associated with them, and probably also
should be able to say "these two rows of question 2 are actually the same
person".

Also, it's not clear what version number we should put in; the page seems
to suggest using e.g. v3.0 if you are a current LLVM developer, but that
doesn't make sense because we have been in v3.x for a very long time.
It doesn't really matter though, because LLVM development does not revolve
around releases and so using version numbers to identify anything about
developer involvement doesn't make sense. I would recommend just using the
time of involvement, ideally pre-populated from mailing list information.


-- Sean Silva



On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 4:50 AM, codeface <codeface at fim.uni-passau.de>
wrote:

> Dear Open-Source Developers,
>
> The University of Passau is currently studying the mechanisms that
> contribute to effective collaboration in open-source projects so that
> appropriate tools and techniques are created to support the needs of
> open-source developers. To achieve this goal, we are evaluating the
> usefulness of software archives (e.g., mailing lists, version-control
> system, and bug tracker) to quantitatively model social relationships and
> collaborative patterns in open-source projects. The culmination of this
> effort is an open-source project called Codeface, which is a framework and
> web front-end for analyzing social and technical aspects of software
> development. To learn more about Codeface, please visit
> http://siemens.github.io/codeface.
>
> We are now recruiting open-source developers to participate in a short
> survey. The survey is composed of 4 questions and takes about *5 minutes*
> to complete. We ensure that all of your information will be kept
> confidential and will only be used for scientific research purposes. There
> is no commercial interest in the results. We are merely interested in
> learning about your collaborative experiences as an open-source developer.
>
> To access the survey, please click on the link below.
> http://rfhinf067.hs-regensburg.de:8080/login.html
>
> We highly appreciate your efforts, and we sincerely hope that you will
> take the time to participate. Upon completion of the survey, you may
> include your e-mail address so that we can send you the anonymized survey
> results.
>
> We would also like to express our gratitude for support from Siemens
> Corporate Research and University of Applied Sciences Regensburg.
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Mitchell Joblin
>
> PhD Student
> Department of Informatics and Mathematics
> University of Passau
>
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> LLVMdev at cs.uiuc.edu         http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev
>
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