Survey "Success factors and barriers in changing the development process of Free/Open Source Software Projects"
In August 2007, the
Free/Open Source Software Group at Freie Universität is conducting a survey about attempts to introduce inventions in Open Soure projects. The focus of this survey is to understand what the community members are trying to achieve, who they are, how they do it and how successful they are in improving their projects.
The results of this work should help the community to understand better how they should go about to improve projects and which kinds of changes are easy or difficult to achieve.
The research questions for this are:
- RQ1: Which kinds of people in which roles are trying to positively affect their Open Source projects?
- RQ2: What kinds of changes are being attempted?
- RQ3: How did community members achieve their goals?
- RQ4: What are the reasons for success or failure?
- RQ5: Which roles, goals and activities correlate with success or failure?
Participate
If you have successfully accomplished a change in a Free Software or Open Source project or attempted such a change we would love to hear your story.
You can either fill out our survey of eleven questions at
http://survey.mi.fu-berlin.de/public/survey.php?name=changeEpisodeSurvey
or write down your story in a single text field:
http://survey.mi.fu-berlin.de/public/survey.php?name=changeEpisode
Discuss with us and get help
If you want to change a project and to discuss problems or ask for our insights, don't hesitate to drop us a note at
oezbek[replace-with-at]inf.fu-berlin.de or submit the following contact form:
http://survey.mi.fu-berlin.de/public/survey.php?name=futureChange
History
- A first version of the change survey was deployed on Thursday 2007-08-10, but was found too difficult to fill-out.
- The new version relying only on an essay field was publicized on Tuesday 2007-08-21 with the following mailing-lists:
Results
Results will be posted here at the end of August.
If you are interested in this research or have questions, please don't hesitate to contact oezbek[the at sign]inf.fu-berlin.de.