A tailored participatory action research for foss communities
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A tailored participatory action research for foss communities Adam Alami1
· Peter Axel Nielsen2 · Andrzej Wa¸sowski1
Published online: 4 August 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Participatory Action Research (PAR) is an established method to implement change in organizations. However, it cannot be applied in the open source (FOSS) communities, without adaptation to their particularities, especially to the specific control mechanisms developed in FOSS. FOSS communities are self-managed, and rely on consensus to reach decisions. This study proposes a PAR framework specifically tailored to FOSS communities. We successfully applied the framework to implement a set of quality assurance interventions in the Robot Operating System community. The framework we proposed is composed of three components, interventions design, democratization, and execution. We believe that this process will work for other FOSS communities too. We have learned that changing a particular aspect of a FOSS community is arduous. To achieve success the change must rally the community around it for support and attract motivated volunteers to implement the interventions. Keywords Participatory Action Research · FOSS · Change implementation
1 Introduction Many FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) projects have matured over the years to produce software of considerable size and complexity. Some have seen generational changes. The need to rediscover, re-factor, and re-engineer existing code bases will only increase over time (Capiluppi and Beecher 2009), as will the need to deal with technological Communicated by: Jon Whittle Adam Alami
[email protected] Peter Axel Nielsen [email protected] Andrzej Wa¸sowski [email protected] 1
IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, DK-2300, Copenhagen S, Denmark
2
Aalborg University, Selma Lagerl¨ofs Vej 300, 9220 Aalborg, Denmark
3640
Empirical Software Engineering (2020) 25:3639–3670
changes, processes, infrastructure, dependencies, and deployment platforms. We can safely assume that handling growth and maturity will require an introduction and intensification of the best practices, processes, methods and tools of software engineering. However, our understanding of how to change a FOSS community is limited. The pragmatic objective of the work described her is to improve the Robot Operating System (ROS) community quality assurance (QA) practices. Through the mechanisms of a participatory action research process, we intend to introduce, and when necessary, reinvigorate best QA practices in the ROS community. We want to align the ROS QA with practices of other FOSS communities practices and with modern software engineering expectations. This will simultaneously yield a change in the affected community and new method to work with FOSS communities. How does a FOSS community carry out change implementation? As communities increase in maturity and size, they will adopt more formal decision making processes (Fitzgerald 2006). An example was the introduction of voti
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