Managing to release early, often and on time in the OpenStack software ecosystem

Abstract

The dictum of "Release early, release often." by Eric Raymond as the Linux modus operandi highlights the importance of release management in open source software development. However, there are very few empirical studies addressing release management in this context. It is already known that most open source software communities adopt either a feature-based or time-based release strategy. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages that are also context-specific. Recent research reports that many prominent open source software projects have overcome a number of recurrent problems by moving from feature-based to time-based release strategies. In this longitudinal case study, we address the release management practices of OpenStack, a large scale open source project developing cloud computing technologies. We discuss how the release management practices of OpenStack have evolved in terms of chosen strategy and timeframes with close attention to processes and tools. We discuss the number of practical and managerial issues related to release management within the context of large and complex software ecosystems. Our findings also reveal that multiple release management cycles can co-exist in large and complex software ecosystems such as OpenStack.

Companies’ Participation in OSS Development–An Empirical Study of OpenStack

“…The ongoing OSS ecosystem we studied, OpenStack, is a major open source cloud computing platform and is currently widely used around the world [24]. OpenStack was started in July 2010 by NASA and Rackspace (an established IT web hosting company) [16]. After two years, Rackspace moved the leadership to the OpenStack Foundation, which oversees the development and construction of the surrounding ecosystem.…”

“…This contribution model directly relates to the original industry of companies. For example, SwiftStack, 16 powering hybrid cloud storage for enterprises, mainly focuses on Swift (providing object storage service in OpenStack 17 ), and its commits contributed to Swift reach 75 percent of its total commits to OpenStack.…”

“…While the Linux kernel ecosystem has, perhaps, the largest number of companies participating, which is not easy to be separated into autonomous projects that we need to observe the variation in both company and volunteer participation. Instead we conduct an empirical study of OpenStack, one of the fast growing OSS ecosystems that is increasingly attracting scholarly attention [14], [15], [16]. OpenStack has 485 individual repositories with a large number of volunteers and 268 companies participating in the development of a recent release (the 14th release), including hardware manufacturers, software vendors, system integrators, and consultancy corporations.…”

Onboarding vs. Diversity, Productivity and Quality — Empirical Study of the OpenStack Ecosystem

“…For example, the OpenStack SECO has a dedicated Open-Stack upstream Institute (OuI) [15] responsible for organizing its onboarding process. O uI is necessary since OpenStack ranks among the largest open-source collaborative communities globally with a codebase size of over 20M LOC and produces a new SECO release every six months [16]. Due to its vast diversity in projects (with over 2,000 project/subproject, technical standards, and social norms), new contributors may experience difficulties understanding the roadmap of OpenStack, which can significantly slow down contributions to the codebase.…”

Automatic Release Notes Generation: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Reno [15] is a tool that is used for the generation of RNs. The generated are in a standard format organized into the group's new features, bug fixes, known issues, etc.…”