IEEE Access (Jan 2024)
A Tertiary Study on Open-Source Software Research
Abstract
Open-source software (OSS) development has become prominent in the software industry over the last 20 years. OSS has transformed how software is developed, distributed, and maintained. This increase in popularity has led to extensive research in various domains of OSS, such as evolution, adoption, community and development processes.With the passage of time the volume of academic studies increased in the area of OSS, including Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) and Systematic Mapping Studies (SMS), which have provided valuable insights into specific aspects of OSS. The OSS domain is vast, with many areas that are still under explored. The fragmented nature of the existing studies presents challenges for both researchers and practitioners in identifying comprehensive research trends, gaps, future directions, and the cohesive understanding of the broader trends within the field. The secondary studies synthesize the literature to highlight findings and gaps of an area. The fragmentation of OSS academic literature limits the ability of researchers to identify unexplored or under-researched areas. This also creates challenges for both practitioners and researchers, as they lack awareness of the best practices, tools, technologies, and methodologies in a OSS domain. This study is motivated by the need to consolidate the extensive research conducted in the OSS domain, providing a holistic view that can guide future investigations and practical applications. The rationale for conducting this research lies in the opportunity to aggregate and classify existing OSS research areas, topics, and future directions through a systematic tertiary study. By synthesizing the findings from secondary studies, this research aims to offer a meta-level understanding of the OSS field, uncovering overlooked areas and defining a research agenda. The systematic approach, guided by the established protocol of Kitchenham, ensures that the study is conducted rigorously, with a focus on comprehensiveness and reliability. Ultimately, this research seeks to contribute to the OSS community by highlighting key research areas that require further exploration, thereby advancing the field and supporting the continued growth and innovation within OSS development. A systematic tertiary study is performed to cover all the systematic secondary studies in the area of OSS. The guidelines of Kitchenham are used for designing the protocol. The protocol details the research objectives, scope, search strategy, data extraction, quality assessment and synthesis. The protocol is detailed in section three for transparency. We have identified seventy-four studies that consist of twenty-five SMS and forty-nine SLR. The literature is mapped to a published taxonomy of OSS by Aksulu and Wade, however, the future directions are thematically analyzed. The results of mapping show that the highest number of studies (forty-seven) are in the sub-category of “OSS categorization/research agenda”, whereas eight studies are mapped to the subcategory “OSS vs Proprietary”. Both of these sub-categories fall in the main category of “Conceptual”. The second major work is in the “OSS Production” category in the sub-categories of “Communities” (ten), “Process” (eight), “User and Developer Motivation” (nine), and “Self-Organization (Product and Community Evolution)” (six). Seven studies are also mapped to the sub-category of “Software Quality” in the main category of “Performance Metrics”. Other categories have fewer studies mapped to them. The areas identified, thematically, for future directions are “OSS contributors”, “OSS development process”, “OSS evolution and prediction”, “use of OSS in different domains”, and “OSS adoption/adaptation/integration”. The mapping between “key research areas” of systematic secondary studies and “taxonomy categories” shows that there is no or little research in some of the categories of taxonomy, having potential of future research. The future directions thematic analysis will also aid researchers and practitioners.
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