Enforcing adherence to standards in software development in order to produce high quality software artefacts has long been recognised as best practice in traditional software engineering. In a distributed heterogeneous development environment such those found within the Open Source paradigm,...

Tropos is an agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) methodology, based on the notion of actors, with goals and plans, and spanning all the phases of software development, from the very early phases of requirements analysis down to the actual implementation. The effectiveness of such...

Empirical research on Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) has shown that developers tend to cluster around two main roles: "core" contributors differ from "peripheral" developers in terms of a larger number of responsibilities and a higher productivity pattern. A further, cross-cutting...

Simulation modelling of growth trends and other empirical data from software systems can reveal the main drivers of software evolution and help improve understanding and management of the software evolution phenomenon. This article reports on the application of qualitative abstraction techniques...