Category Archives: Research Contributions

Designing an Integrated Open Innovation System: Towards Organizational Wholeness

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Title: Designing an Integrated Open Innovation System: Towards Organizational Wholeness

Authors: Vasiliki Baka

Abstract: Increasing use of collaborative technologies has transformed organizational dynamics in novel ways. In this paper, we adopt the principle of wholeness in designing an  integrated open innovation system. We provide an overview of existing collaborative technologies and situate the proposed sociotechnical arrangement within the paradigm of open innovation. We explore how effectively technological platforms address emergent collaboration and innovation practices within and across organizations and to which extent existing technologies act as strategic catalysts of open innovation. We argue that in embracing wholeness and in treating technologies as inseparable constitutive  parts of organizational architecture, we foster organizational and institutional collaboration and encourage innovative practices. The focus of the paper is on how the design of sociotechnical systems as wholes, that is systems that are concurrently acting as corporate websites, internal collaboration spaces, extranets and social media aggregators, actively promotes open innovation in practice. We close with a presentation of six cases that are illustrative of how such a system could be applicable within the open innovation paradigm, namely, citizen participation, crowdsourcing and open innovation contests, open source innovation, reviews and social media, social enterprises and open teaching.

This contribution to OpenSym 2014 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2014 proceedings on or after August 27, 2014.

Filling the Gaps of Development Logs and Bug Issue Data

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Title: Filling the Gaps of Development Logs and Bug Issue Data

Authors: Bilyaminu Auwal Romo (Brunel University London), Andrea Capiluppi (Brunel University London), Tracy Hall (Brunel University London)

Abstract: It has been suggested that the data from bug repositories is not always in sync or complete compared to the logs detailing the actions of developers on source code. In this paper, we trace two sources of information relative to software bugs: the change logs of the actions of developers and the issues reported as bugs. The aim is to identify and quantify the discrepancies between the two sources in recording and storing the developer logs relative to bugs. Focussing on the databases produced by two mining software repository tools, CVSAnalY and Bicho, we use part of the SZZ algorithm to identify bugs and to compare how the ”defects-fixing changes” are recorded in the two databases. We use a working example to show how to do so. The results indicate that there is a significant amount of information, not in sync when tracing bugs in the two databases. We, therefore, propose an automatic approach to re-align the two databases, so that the collected information is mirrored and in sync.

This contribution to OpenSym 2014 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2014 proceedings on or after August 27, 2014.

Socio-Technical Congruence in the Ruby Ecosystem

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Title: Socio-Technical Congruence in the Ruby Ecosystem

Authors: Mahbubul Syeed (Tampere University of Technology), Klaus Marius Hansen (University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark), Imed Hammouda (Chalmers and University of Gothenburg, Sweden), Konstantinos Manikas (University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark)

Abstract: Existing studies show that open source projects may enjoy high levels of socio-technical congruence despite their open and distributed character. Such observations are yet to be confirmed in the case of larger open source ecosystems in which developers contribute to different projects within the ecosystem. In this paper, we empirically study the relationships between the developer coordination activities and the project dependency structure in the Ruby ecosystem. Our motivation is to verify whether the ecosystem context maintains the high socio-technical congruence levels observed in many smaller scale FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) projects. Our study results show that the collaboration pattern among the developers in Ruby ecosystem is not necessarily shaped by the communication needs indicated by the dependencies among the ecosystem projects.

This contribution to OpenSym 2014 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2014 proceedings on or after August 27, 2014.

The Impact of Automatic Crash Reports on Bug Triaging and Development in Mozilla

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Title: The Impact of Automatic Crash Reports on Bug Triaging and Development in Mozilla

Authors: Iftekhar Ahmed (Oregon State University), Nitin Mohan (Oregon State University), Carlos Jensen (Oregon State University)

Abstract: Free/Open Source Software projects often rely on users submitting bug reports. However, reports submitted by novice users may lack information critical to developers, and the process may be intimidating and difficult. To gather more and better data, projects deploy automatic crash reporting tools, which capture stack traces and memory dumps when a crash occurs. These systems potentially generate large volumes of data, which may overwhelm developers, and their presence may discourage users from submitting traditional bug reports. In this paper, we examine Mozilla’s automatic crash reporting system and how it affects their bug triaging process. We find that fewer than 0.00009% of crash reports end up in a bug report, but as many as 2.33% of bug reports have data from crash reports added. Feedback from developers shows that despite some problems, these systems are valuable. We conclude with a discussion of the pros and cons of automatic crash reporting systems.

This contribution to OpenSym 2014 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2014 proceedings on or after August 27, 2014.