Collaborative Software Design and Modeling in Open Source Systems

The Open source ecosystem creates new pathways for participation and collaboration from a broad and diverse community of developers. As a software system grows, the need to capture its design, often through models, becomes important in order to boost communication and collaboration. In this paper, we report on a study that assesses the open source community’s adoption of modeling as a way to capture design and enable collaboration among development teams. The study includes a search of open source repositories to identify modeling artifacts, a survey, a questionnaire, and a set of interviews with open source contributors. Our findings show that there is a low number of modeling artifacts that are included in open source project repositories. However, the survey, the questionnaire, and the interviews suggest that capturing design in models is much more common than what can be inferred by searching the repositories alone. These models are created through collaborations, but often are not shared in the open source repositories. This is due to many factors including the lack of incentives to share modeling artifacts beyond the immediate circle of collaborators and limited collaboration support in modeling tools.