FOSS Suggest - Suggesting improvements for Free / Open Source Projects

Type

• Bachelor: 10% theoretical work, 40% social interaction, 40% empirical work
• Master: 15% theoretical work, 35% social interaction, 40% empirical work, 10% evaluation

Project

This work is part of the research in the area Free and Open Source Software Engineering.

Description

With this thesis we want to evaluate how an external person best suggests improvements for Free and Open Source projects. In particular we want to convince FOSS projects to start using subversion instead of cvs and do more testing using JUnit. The goal of the thesis is to evaluate different strategies for "preaching" such approaches and to come up with a set of rules and guidelines of how to approach the process of suggesting improvements.

Here a list of preliminary approaches:

• Directly contact mailing list and suggest improvements.
• Contact main responsible persons in the project personally.
• Write articles in related media.
• Work for the change yourself and invite people to join.

The scientific goals of this thesis are:

• to find a categorization of approaches to suggest improvements
• propose a set of rules depending on the nature of a targeted project of how to suggest the improvement
• field-test those approaches by performing case-studies using JUnit and CVS/SVN.

Advisor

This work is offered by Christopher Oezbek and Prof. Prechelt. If you are interested send an e-mail to oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de.