Calliope: supporting high-level documentation of open-source projects

ABSTRACT

Open-source development has long passed the state of infancy. With brands such as Apache, Mozilla and Linux, open-source development is becoming a major player on the global software market. Yet, most open-source projects today are using mailing lists as their primary communication channel and the resulting mailing archives as their only source of documentation. Mailing archives typically contain massive amounts of data, and only support simplistic structures, creating problems such as "information overflow". This makes it difficult for the developers to maintain a common direction of their work, causing reduced productivity and eventually loss of developers.

Various approaches have been suggested to address this and similar problems, both for open-source development and for software development in general. Some approaches enable developers to model their exact reasoning; others extract new data from existing data; yet again others let developers describe low level details of the system in close proximity to the actual code.

The Calliope project aims at facilitating developers in aligning their efforts in a common direction at a high level of abstraction. As an important aspect of this, we propose that the explicit modeling of multivalence could improve the acceptance of more advanced documentation tools into the environment of open-source development. In order to test this claim, we have built a prototype that implements explicit modeling of multivalence. With this prototype we have carried out tests, that support our claim.

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