CfP: WoPDaSD 2006

[Apologies if you receive this more than once]

  ** Call for papers **

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   Workshop on Public Data about Software Development (WoPDaSD 2006)

co-located with the 2nd International Conference on Open Source Systems 
                June 10th 2006, Grand Hotel, Como, Italy

            http://libresoft.urjc.es/Activities/WoPDaSD2006
	
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Recently, because of the huge availability of data
about software development that can be obtained from libre (free,
open source) projects, the research community is starting to produce,
use and exchange large data sets of information. These data sets have to
be retrieved, purged, described, and can be published for public
consumption by other groups. Their availability allows for the
decoupling of research activities (some groups can focus on data
retrieval and preliminary analysis, which others can devote to more
in-dept analysis without bothering with data retrieval), the
reproducibility of research results, and even the collaboration (and
competition) in the analysis of data.

All this activity is being presented in several workshops and
conferences, but a single place to exchange experiences does not exist
yet. We propose this workshop as such a place, where researchers in the
field can discuss the specifics of working with these kinds of data
sets, how they are retrieved, how can they be analyzed and mined, 
how they can be exchanged and complemented, etc.

=== Main Goals ===
	
The goal of this workshop is to foster the analysis of publicly available
data sources about software development and the exchange of data between
different research groups.

The workshop is aimed specifically at two different target studies:

     1. Analysis of some data collections about software development
        (provided by the organizers, see below). 
        The analysis should show a methodology for exploring any of
        those data sets (or better, to relate both) searching for some
        specific result in the area of software development, and its
        applications to the actual data sets. The study can be in the
        field of software engineering, economics, sociology, human
        resources, and others.
        
        
     2. Retrieval process and exchange formats of publicly available data
        collections about software development. 
        The data collections presented should be publicly available,
        based themselves on public data (so that other groups could
        reproduce the data collection process), and be related to the
        field of software development. This includes, but is not limited
        to, data from source control systems, bug-tracking systems,
        mailing lists, websites, source and binary code, quality
        assurance systems, etc. Although any kind of data collection can
        be considered, those including information about a large amount
        of projects will be considered especially appropriate.

=== Detailed description ===

Following the goals described above, the workshop will accept papers
about two specific issues:

     1. Analysis of two data collections about libre software
        development: FLOSSMole and CVSAnaly-SF. 
        These collections, already available to any researcher, are
        offered for the analysis. The studies submitted should detail
        how they have been used, which part of the information has been
        considered, how they have been validated or filtered and/or
        post-processed (if that is the case). The description should be
        detailed enough to let any other research group reproduce the
        study.
        
        
     2. Studies about the data retrieval and preparation for public
        consumption of data sets in the same realm, which could be
        proposed for analysis in future editions of the workshop.

=== FLOSSMole ===

FLOSSmole (formerly OSSmole) is a set of tools for gathering data
(metrics) about the development of free/libre/open source projects. The
FLOSSMole project also publishes the resulting analysis about FLOSS
projects, and accepts data donations from other research groups. It
offers this workshop a complete set of data gathered from the
SourceForge development platform and the Freshmeat announcement systems.

More information can be obtained from http://ossmole.sourceforge.net

=== CVSAnaly-SF === 

CVSAnalY is a tool created by the Libre Software Engineering Group at
the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos that extracts statistical information
out of CVS (and recently Subversion) repository logs and transforms it
in database SQL formats. It has been used to retrieve information for
all projects that have an active CVS system at SourceForge. This data
set is publicly offered to be analyzed in this workshop.

More information can be obtained from http://libresoft.urjc.es/Data

=== Target audience ===

The target audience is composed by the research groups interested in
empirical software engineering and quantitative studies of the software
development processes and methods. This includes not only software
engineers, but also researchers from other fields that might use the
data for economic, social and other studies.

=== Important Dates === 

      * Intent to submit: 21st April 2006
      * Deadline for submission: 28th April 2006
      * Paper notification: 21st May 2006
      * Camera-ready paper due: 2nd June 2006
      * Workshop date: 10th June 2006

=== Organizing Committee ===

      * Jesús M. González-Barahona (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)
      * Megan Conklin (Elon University, USA)
      * Gregorio Robles (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)

=== Program Committee === 

      * Stefan Koch (Wirtschaftsuniversität Vienna, Austria)
      * Kevin Crowston (Syracuse University, USA)
      * Bart Massey (Portland State University, USA)
      * Sandeep Krishnamurthy (University of Washington, USA)
      * Kieran Healy (University of Arizona, USA)
      * Dawid Weiss (Poznan University of Technology, Poland)
      * Daniel M. Germán (University of Victoria, Canada)


-- 
Gregorio Robles           | Libre Software Engineering Lab
grex-eneoqThHf3GDmu24MmG3/[email protected]   | Grupo de Sistemas y Comunicaciones
Tel: +34 91 488 81 06     | Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
http://libresoft.urjc.es  | Tulipán s/n, 28933 Móstoles (Madrid, Spain)