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Exploring the Rationale of Design Decisions in Open-Source Software Mailing Lists and their Relationship to Architectural Issues

Meijer, Willem (2022) Exploring the Rationale of Design Decisions in Open-Source Software Mailing Lists and their Relationship to Architectural Issues. Master's Internship Report, Computing Science.

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Abstract

In open-source software, architectural knowledge (AK) is incoherently spread across various platforms such as issue tracking systems, source code and mailing lists. Previous research has explored AK concepts discussed in issue tracking systems and blogs. However, no similar exploration has been performed on mailing lists yet. Similarly, the relationship between issue tracking systems and mailing lists is not yet done. This study attempts to bridge this gap by exploring what decision rationale types are used in mailing lists and by identifying how architectural issues are used in mailing lists. To identify rationale types and architectural email-issue relationships, thematic analysis is used on emails sampled from six Apache projects: Cassandra, Tajo, and the four sub-projects of Hadoop: Hadoop-common, HDFS, MapReduce, and Yarn. To determine what decision rationale is used in mailing lists and what its relationship is with decision types, an analysis is performed on 156 architectural emails, identifying nine types of decision rationale, six relationships between rationale types and three relationships between decision types and rationale types. To identify architectural email-issue relationships an analysis is performed on 482 architectural emails, identifying three relationship superclasses, six relationship subclasses and 14 relationships between relationship types. The findings of this work create a better understanding of how mailing lists complement other sources of AK.

Item Type: Thesis (Master's Internship Report)
Supervisor name: Soliman, M.A.M. and Avgeriou, P.
Degree programme: Computing Science
Thesis type: Master's Internship Report
Language: English
Date Deposited: 30 Aug 2022 10:40
Last Modified: 30 Aug 2022 10:40
URI: https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/28569

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