Herding cats in a FOSS ecosystem: a tale of communication and coordination for release management
Journal article, 2017

Release management in large-scale software development projects requires significant communication and coordination. It is particularly challenging in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystems, in which hundreds of loosely connected developers and their projects are coordinated to release software to a schedule. To better understand this process and its challenges, we analyzed over two and half years of communication in the GNOME ecosystem and studied developers’ interactions. Through a case study, we cataloged communication channels, determined the main channel from which we categorized high level communication and coordination activities spanning five releases, and triangulated our results by interviewing ten key developers. We found that a release schedule, influence (instead of direct control), and diversity are the main factors that positively impact the release process in the GNOME ecosystem. We report a set of lessons learned that encapsulates our understanding of how the Release Management process function in a FOSS ecosystem, we learned that: (1) ensure that the release team follows the main communication channels used by developers, (2) provide a common place for coordination for an ecosystem, (3) consider including both good technical and social skills in a release team, (4) aim for a diverse release team, (5) based on lack of power, lobbying and consensus based management must be followed, (6) help the release team in the coordination process with a well defined schedule, and (7) release team work is different from regular software work. Our results can help organizations build better large-scale teams and show that research focused on individual projects might miss important parts of the picture. © 2017, The Author(s).

Software ecosystem

Empirical study

Release management

Author

Germán Poo-Caamaño

University of Victoria

Eric Knauss

University of Gothenburg

Leif Singer

University of Victoria

Daniel M. German

University of Victoria

Journal of Internet Services and Applications

1867-4828 (ISSN) 1869-0238 (eISSN)

Vol. 8 1 Article number 12- 12

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Areas of Advance

Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

Building Futures (2010-2018)

Subject Categories

Software Engineering

Other Natural Sciences

DOI

10.1186/s13174-017-0063-2

More information

Latest update

4/5/2022 6