I attended the joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the Foundations of Software Engineering Conference earlier this month in Szeged, Hungary. I was fortunate enough to have a paper in the 4th Workshop on Social Software Engineering and also in the main conference.
This is a short little paper that I wrote based on some observations regarding how software engineering teams share information and coordinate. In short, economics says there are two different models of sharing information – top down (Keynesian) or bottom up (Austrian). However, as we know, neither is 100% correct. We need to flow information up from the bottom and down from the top. However, simply flowing the information up or down doesn’t do us much good because the information won’t get where it is needed. We’ve noticed that most projects have someone who acts as an intercessor for communications, now we just need to find them.
P. Wagstrom, “Engineering Software Engineering Teams,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Social Software Engineering, Szeged, Hungary, 2011. [pdf][pptx]
A longer paper written with Corey Jergensen and Anita Sarma at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. We analyzed several projects within my large GNOME data set to understand how users actually join a project and how it might expand into an ecosystem. We found that the basic socialization pattern of email, bugs, then code is rarely found on individual projects. Rather, it’s much more common to find it across the ecosystem. We also identify several ways that individuals can apply shared knowledge across projects in the ecosystem.
C. Jergensen, A. Sarma, and P. Wagstrom, “The Onion Patch: Migration in Open Source Ecosystems,” in Proceedings of the 8th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the Foundations of Software Engineering, Szeged, Hungary, 2011. [pdf][pptx]