Jasmin Ramadani

Verena Käfer, Daniel Graziotin, Ivan Bogicevic et al.

Communication is essential in software engineering. Especially in distributed open-source teams, communication needs to be supported by channels including mailing lists, forums, issue trackers, and chat systems. Yet, we do not have a clear understanding of which communication channels stakeholders in open-source projects use. In this study, we fill the knowledge gap by investigating a statistically representative sample of 400 GitHub projects. We discover the used communication channels by regular expressions on project data. We show that (1) half of the GitHub projects use observable communication channels; (2) GitHub Issues, e-mail addresses, and the modern chat system Gitter are the most common channels; (3) mailing lists are only in place five and have a lower market share than all modern chat systems combined.

Klaus Lochmann, Jasmin Ramadani, Stefan Wagner

The concept of software quality is very complex and has many facets. Reflecting all these facets and at the same time measuring everything related to these facets results in comprehensive but large quality models and extensive measurements. In contrast, there are also many smaller, focused quality models claiming to evaluate quality with few measures. We investigate if and to what extent it is possible to build a focused quality model with similar evaluation results as a comprehensive quality model but with far less measures needed to be collected and, hence, reduced effort. We make quality evaluations with the comprehensive Quamoco base quality model and build focused quality models based on the same set of measures and data from over 2,000 open source systems. We analyse the ability of the focused model to predict the results of the Quamoco model by comparing them with a random predictor as a baseline. We calculate the standardised accuracy measure SA and effect sizes. We found that for the Quamoco model and its 378 automatically collected measures, we can build a focused model with only 10 measures but an accuracy of 61% and a medium to high effect size. We conclude that we can build focused quality models to get an impression of a system's quality similar to comprehensive models. However, when including manually collected measures, the accuracy of the models stayed below 50%. Hence, manual measures seem to have a high impact and should therefore not be ignored in a focused model.