Final Thesis: Measuring Patch-Flow at an Automotive Company

Abstract:  Inner Source (IS) is the adoption of Open Source (OS) development practices and culture in a corporate environment to increase the efficiency and quality of software development (SD). The impact of IS certainly depends on the effectiveness of a company’s effort to integrate IS by implementing IS programs. But how do researchers and practitioners determine whether an IS program increases IS activity? IS-research lacks quantitative metrics to assess IS-activity. Recently, Capraro et al. (2018) published the Patch-Flow Measurement Method. Patch-flow measurement is a quantitative approach to measure code contributions between organizational units (OUs) across the organizational hierarchy. Analyzing patch-flow may contribute to the development of meaningful metrics to assess a company’s IS-activity. In this thesis, we measured patch-flow of an automotive company by utilizing the GitHub Enterprise API. The gathered patch-flow data sample comprises incomplete records. To conduct an exploratory analysis of the patch-flow data, we had to create missing associations between IS-projects and OUs by developing a data-driven mapping strategy. Despite anomalies in the analysis, it reveals the importance of considering patch-flow involved IS-participants. Furthermore, we propose a metric to assess IS-activity based on our research.
Keywords: inner source

PDFs: Work Description

Reference: Daniele Plantera. Measuring Patch-Flow at an Automotive Company. Master Thesis, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg: 2018.