Speaker
Ms
Flore Barcellini
(INRIA-Eiffel Team)
Description
In this talk, we aim at analyzing the ways members of open-source software
communities, especially users, participate in the software design process. The
general objective of this research in cognitive ergonomics is to understand
activities occurring during the design process in order to better support
collaborative work, greater interaction between various stakeholders, and
construction of design projects memory. In our current work, we focus on the Python
community. In a first study, we analyze online discussions between participants
engaged in the Python Enhancement Proposal or PEP design process. We propose an
alternative approach to threading to represent online discussions: it is based on the
quoting practices as a relevant link between messages. We also show the influence of
participants status in design-oriented online discussions and highlight the
evaluative nature of design activities, i.e. pair reviewing mechanisms. A second
study, still in progress, aims at understanding the “Python galaxy”, the links
between the different communities in this galaxy, and the language evolution process
from the idea of language evolution in one particular application domain, through its
acceptance by one or several communities, to the PEP and its related modules
implementations. The analysis of a “pushed-by-users” PEP extended design process
shows how users may participate in the language evolution process, in particular
through mechanisms of cross-participation between communities. This talk will give us
the opportunity to get feedback from the Python community on our research and could
engage interested Python members into a reflective approach about their collaborative
practices.
Author
Ms
Flore Barcellini
(INRIA-Eiffel Team)
Co-authors
Dr
Francoise Detienne
(INRIA-Eiffel Team)
Dr
Jean-Marie Burkhardt
(Universite Paris 5, LEI)
