A Project Monitoring Cockpit Based On Integrating Data Sources in Open Source Software Development

Many open source software (OSS) development projects use tools and models that come from heterogeneous sources. A project manager, who wants to analyze indicators for the state of the project based on these data sources, faces the challenge of how to link semi-structured information on common concepts across heterogeneous data sources, e.g., source code versions, mailing list entries, and bug reports. Unfortunately, manual analysis is costly, error-prone, and often yields results late for decision making. In this paper we propose linking OSS data sources using semantic web technologies as foundation for providing integrated indicators project status analysis. We introduce the design concept of a project monitoring cockpit, Pro-MonCo, and evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness with a pro-totype for calculating communication metrics in a real-world context, the Apache Tomcat project. Major result was that Pro-MonCo efficiently supports frequent project monitoring by calculating communication metrics based on semantically integrated data originating from heterogeneous OSS project data sources.