Mining Problem-solving Behaviour from Open-Source Respositories

像Linux和Mozilla这样的开源系统既创新又受欢迎。它们是由一群非正式的志愿者建立的，以分布式、异步的方式工作。沟通和协调是通过电子邮件和共享存储库(包含手册、设计文档、源代码和错误报告)进行的。这个存储库构成了用户反馈、人工产物演变和与任务相关的问题解决行为的广泛在线记录。这些数据是公开的，并且服从于现代数据挖掘技术，以及自动程序分析算法。我们的目标是将这些自动化分析与社会科学方法相结合，研究大型开源项目中社区行为与软件工程结果之间的内在关系，以期改善软件工程实践。我们组建了一个由一名软件工程师、一名社会科学家和一名数据库研究员组成的跨学科研究团队。软件系统对经济和社会有巨大的影响；对软件开发背后的社会过程的更好的理解很可能导致更快地开发出更便宜、更好的软件系统。我们的跨学科合作建立在现有工作的基础上，通过明确地将软件工程的必要性与社会科学的技术联系起来；因此，我们希望评估民俗学原则的相关性，例如声称构件结构和社区结构之间的关系的“康威定律”。最后，这种合作将帮助我们制定新的、急需的跨学科教学方法，以在软件开发的社会方面对本科生和研究生软件工程师进行培训：团队建设、工作分配、协调、项目管理和过程改进。

Open Source systems such as Linux and Mozilla are both innovative and popular. They are built by an informal group of volunteers, working in a distributed, asynchronous manner. Communication and coordination are mediated by emails and shared repositories (containing manuals, design documents, source code and bug reports). This repository constitutes an extensive on-line record of user feedback, artifact evolution and task-related problem-solving behaviors. This data is publicly available, and is amenable to modern data mining techniques, as well as automated program analysis algorithms. Our goal is to integrate these automated analyses with social science methods to study the intrinsic relationship between community behavior and software engineering outcomes in large-scale open source projects, with view to improving software engineering practice. We have assembled an inter-disciplinary research team consisting of a software engineer, a social scientist, and a database researcher. Software systems have an enormous impact on the economy and on society; an improved understanding of the social processes underlying software development could well lead to faster development of cheaper, better software systems. Our interdisciplinary collaboration builds on existing work by explicitly connecting software engineering imperatives to the techniques of social science; thus we hope to evaluate the relevance of folklore principles such as "Conway's Law," that claims a relationship between artifact structure and community structure. Finally this collaboration will help us formulate new, much-needed interdisciplinary pedagogy to train both undergraduate and graduate software engineers in the social aspects of software development: team-building, work allocation, coordination, project management, and process improvement.