Observability of Software Engineering Processes in Open Source Software Projects Domain

Open Source Software (OSS) projects as a complex software engineering system is an ideal domain for empirical software engineering, because it provides a lot of data and possibility to introduce new approaches that can be easily adapted and enrich methods to improve the software quality. As flexible and continuous developing systems, OSS projects are always growing as new requirements from users and new code from developers come into the project. However, at some point the project manager wants to know the status of OSS project whether the project is in the right direction and the product is delivered in a good quality. To get the immediate status of OSS project, some efforts have been done to observe the software engineering processes of OSS project. However, current approaches focus on limited areas of health indicators of OSS project. In this research, we will improve the approaches by proposing a framework that integrates different approaches on observing the software engineering processes and monitoring the health status of OSS project. Our objectives are to define observability factors of software engineering by making literature research on prior works and to assess the OSS engineering processes using the observability factors to show that this approach is working and can improve the software quality. In this research we use OSS projects domain as our context, and other engineering domains as references, e.g., production automation and (software+) engineering domains. Our contributions are improvement on the data collection and the data analysis steps.