Dear CHOOSErs,

I am happy to announce a SIGBeer talk on Thursday, August 30, 2007, 16.00 at our institute. The talk is by Prof Prem Devanbu, an expert in the area of software engineering and particularly in software evolution and software repository mining. He will present his latest results on analyzing several open source projects.

I hope to see many of you.

best regards, Harald Gall

Title: Interdisciplinary Studies of Open Source Software (OSS) Projects. Speaker: Prof. Prem Devanbu, http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~devanbu/

location: University of Zurich, Department of Informatics, Binzmuehlestrasse 14, 8050 Zurich (train station Oerlikon) Room 2.A.01 http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/ifi/how_to_reach_us/

Abstract: We all love to hate large software systems. They are hard to build, hard to evolve, and don't work very well. Why is this? A lot of reasons, some social, some technical, and some socio-technical. We believe that OSS provides an excellent source of data to test hypotheses about the factors that affect important phenomena/outcomes in software projects. Our group at UC Davis, comprising bio-informaticians, organizational behaviourists, physicists, and software engineers, is using a range of different approaches to the analyze the veritable torrents of data pouring out of open source projects to understand how things work in OSS, and what tools and techniques can help. One important issue is <<IMMIGRATION>>: how do new people join projects, and how can we help the difficult intellectual and social challenges they face. We present two results:

1) What are the factors influencing immigration of new developers in Open source projects?

2.a) Can we build "recommender" tools that help programmers deal with "information overload" by helping them focus their attention?

2.b) Such tools have always been evaluated with user studies. Can we do something more quantitative?

Joint work with: V. Filkov, A. Swaminathan, G. Hsu, R. DeSouza, S. Roy and students C. Bird, Z. Saul, D. Posnett, Y. Wang, A. Gourley, D. Pattison.

We gratefully acknowledge support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (Science of Design and Human and Social Dynamics Programs), the IBM Faculty Fellowship Program, and the GrammaTech and SciTools corporations.