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Uncovering Design Mistakes in Free / Open Source Projects |
Type
- Bachelor: 25% theoretical work, 50% social interaction, 25% empirical work
- Master: 25% theoretical work, 35% social interaction, 25% empirical work, 10% evaluation
Project
This work is part of the research in the area Free and Open Source Software Engineering and Error prevention in software development.Description
It is a well-known fact of software engineering that mistakes are more expensive and troublesome if made in earlier stages of the software development process. With this bachelor or master thesis (or Studienarbeit oder Diplomarbeit) we want to have a second look at Raymond's saying that "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" which mostly refers to bugs and consider it in the area of design. It seems to be that the converse hold here:"given enough mouths, all designs are shallow"
Your task as part of this thesis will be to inspect free and open source projects and find design mistakes that have been repaired and analyse them thoroughly. This means that you identify the origin of the wrong decision, trace the implementation, find any clues that reveal when the problem became apparent to the community and gather the facts about who and when a solution was found.
If you aim for a Master or Diplom degree this thesis also includes the formulation of either a model that explains these mistakes and their origins (so called Root Cause Analysis) or formulation of practical guidelines that help FOSS-projects to not commit these mistakes.