Social/Human Aspects of Open Source Software Development

Speaker:	Professor Prem DEVANBU
		Department of Computer Science
		University of California at Davis

Title:		"Social/Human Aspects of Open Source Software Development"

Date:		Monday, 5 October, 2009

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F
		(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre, near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Open source project data has been a bonanza for software engineering
research, much like Afflymetrix chips and gene sequencers have been for
bio-informaticians. Software engineers are now swimming in an ocean of
data, merrily analyzing, clustering, correlating and model-fitting.
However, while researchers have been busily mining the wealth of
information in open source code repositories to study phenomena such as
co-change patterns, evolution, defect occurrence and so on, with a few
exceptions, the human side has largely remained unexplored. How do people
communicate, collaborate, contribute, and how do these processes influence
practical outcomes? These are questions are of vital importance to the
organization of any software project; successful open source projects have
a lot to teach us about such phenomena. Fortunately, there is a wealth of
information in mailing list archives, bug report databases, and even code
repositories that can shed light upon these vital issues. In this talk, I
will the work we have been doing in this area at UC Davis.

Acknowledgement:

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant Numbers IIS-0613949, and SES-052563, and by funding
from IBM and Microsoft. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and
do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation,
IBM or Microsoft.


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Biography:

Prem Devanbu is Professor of Computer Science at UC Davis. He joined UC
Davis after almost 20 years in Industry, including 17 years at AT&T Bell
Labs and its various offshoots. He received his undergraduate degree
in Electrical Engineering from IIT Chennai, India, and his M.S., and
Ph.D from Rutgers University in Piscataway, NJ. He was program chair of
ACM SIGSOFT FSE in 2006, and will chair ICSE 2010. He's on the Editorial
Board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and has served on the
Editorial Board of ACM TOSEM journal.