WoPDaSD 2008, call for contributions

[Please, redistribute this announcement to those who could be
interested]

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3nd International Workshop on Public Data about Software Development
(WoPDaSD 2008)
http://libresoft.es/Activities/Research_activities/WoPDaSD2008

MOTIVATION

In the latest years, and specially thanks to 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-depth 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 since they are not focused specifically on it, exchange
of experiences and discussions are not as deep and fruitful as they
could be. This workshop is once again (for the third year in a row)
being such a place, hosting researchers in the field to discuss
specifically about this kind of data sets, how they are retrieved, how
can they be analyzed and mined, how they can be exchanged and
complemented, etc.=20


IMPORTANT DATES

    * Intent to submit: 16th June 2008 (not mandatory, only for
organizational purposes)
    * Deadline for submission: 25th June 2008
    * Paper notification: 7th July 2008
    * Camera-ready paper due: 14th July 2008
    * Workshop date: 10th September 2008


MAIN GOALS

The goal of this workshop is to foster the analysis of public available
data sources about software development, and the exchange of data
between different research groups.

The workshop is aimed at three different kinds of studies (although
other related studies could also be considered):

   1. Analysis of specific projects (provided by the organizers, see
below).
      The analysis should show a methodology to explore the projects,
but also it should show explanations to ``odd'' things that could appear
in the data set. For instance, a company-driven project can show
different behavior than a community-driven project. The study can be in
the field of software engineering, economics, sociology, human
resources, and others.

   2. Retrieval process and exchange formats of public 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, but 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.

   3. Data mining activities and new retrieval tools.
      Working with a huge quantity of data is always a complex problem.
Data mining techniques are welcome in this section, provided that papers
include some conclusions about a specific set of projects. Again, this
analysis should show a methodology to explore the data and explanations
about the whole process. Cross-analysis of datasets, and specially of
those provided by the organizers (FLOSSMole and FLOSSMetrics databases)
is specially welcome.
      Also, new tools developed to obtain data from several data
sources, such as forums, wikis, bug tracking systems and others fit
perfectly here.=20


DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF DATA SOURCES

Following the goals described above, the workshop will accept papers
about two specific issues (not taking into account the development of
new data mining tools):

   1. Analysis of two data collections about libre software development:
FLOSSMole and FLOSSMetrics
      These collections, already available to any researcher, are
offered for analysis by third parties (see below). 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.=20


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

FLOSSMetrics

At the end of FLOSSMetrics a huge database with data from thousands of
projects. Nowadays, the project is already working on the retrieval of
the data, with information already available for about 1,000 projects
(mainly retrieved from CVS and SVN repositories, but also mailing
lists). These results are publicly available at
http://data.flossmetrics.org

More information can be obtained from http://flossmetrics.org

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.

SUBMISSIONS

We solicit short position papers (3 pages) and research papers (6
pages). Short papers will be expected to discuss controversial issues in
the field, or describe interesting or thought-provoking ideas that are
not yet fully developed, while full papers will be expected to describe
new research results, and have a higher degree of technical rigor than
short papers. The papers must be in ACM 2-column format. Authors may
indicate their intent to submit a paper by June 16th 2008 (the title of
the paper and abstract will need to be submitted online via e-mail to
megan @ elon.edu, jgb @ gsyc.escet.urjc.es, and dizquierdo @
gsyc.escet.urjc.es). The full paper should be sent to the aforementioned
addresses by June 25th 2007 as PDF. Notification of acceptance will be
sent by July 7th 2008. The final version of the paper is due on July
14th 2008. Accepted papers will be published in agreement with the OSS
requirements.=20


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

    * Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)
    * Megan Squire (Elon University, USA)
    * Daniel Izquierdo-Cortazar (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    * Kevin Crowston (Syracuse University, USA)
    * Jean-Christophe Deprez (CETIC, Belgium)
    * Roberto Di Cosmo (University of Paris VII, France)
    * Justin Erenkrantz (Apache, USA)
    * Daniel M. Germ=C3=A1n (University of Victoria, Canada)
    * Robert Gobeille (HP, USA)
    * Stefan Koch (Wirtschaftsuniversit=C3=A4t Vienna, Austria)
    * Ken Krugler (Krugle, Inc., USA)
    * Bart Massey (Portland State University, USA)
    * Sandro Morasca (Universit=C3=A0 dell'Insubria, Italy)
    * Gregorio Robles (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)
    * Francesco Rullani (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)
    * Walt Scacchi (University of California at Irvine, USA)
    * Diomidis Spinellis (Athens University of Economics and Business,
Greece)
    * Tony Wassermann (Carnegie Mellon West, USA)
    * Jim Whitehead (University of California at Santa Cruz, USA)
    * Thomas Zimmermann (Universit=C3=A4t des Saarlandes, Germany)

SPONSORING PROJECTS
Some research projects sponsor this workshop (although it is open to
anyone who registers):

    * FLOSSMole
    * FLOSSMETRICS
    * QUALOSS
    * SQO-OSS
    * QUALIPSO

Some of these projects are funded in part by the European Commission,
under the Information Society Technologies (IST) research programme of
the Sixth Framework Program. A list of the IST projects in the area of
Software Technologies is available from
http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/st/projects.htm.

FURTHER INFORMATION
Should you need further information, you can email jgb @
gsyc.escet.urjc.es.=20

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