Welcome to this web site, which details the research I perform in pursuit of the doctorate degree at Lero — the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, CSIS, University of Limerick. My supervisors are Prof. Brian Fitzgerald and Dr. Kieran Conboy, and you can find out more about me if you want.
Research objective
My research objective is to to find a framework [a skeleton which allows the characteristics of diffusions to be framed and aligned to facilitate comparisons.] which can be used to assess diffusion [the process of spreading ideas, concepts, technology, or products.] of development methods [a systematic way of achieving a goal; often implies the use of tools [a means to facilitate a given operation.].] in the Debian Project, a global project of several thousand volunteers [an individual who enters into, or offers for, any service of his own free will.] contributing to a free computer operating system.
The packaging workflows [Sorry, no definition found for 'workflow'.] used by Debian contributors [Sorry, no definition found for 'contributor'.] are suboptimal: the common methods are minimally integrated at best, and package maintainers lose time and energy on repetitive, error-prone tasks. Alongside individual frustration and unnecessarily high impetus to spend more than the absolute minimum time on package maintenance, it slows overall project progress to a crawl and hinders innovation.
On the other side of the spectrum one finds improved tools, featuring better integration, collaboration facilities, and greater degrees of automation. In the 15 years of age of the Debian Project, only a few such tools have been adopted at a wide scale, while many have never reached significant levels of use.
In recent times, the project has seen strong trends towards techniques supporting distributed development, which promise solutions to many of the (centralised) deadlocks and bottlenecks in the project, and also present a welcome opportunity to rethink processes. Yet, adoption [acceptance with approval, usually following a period of scrutiny.] has been slow, for reasons which are not obvious.
With the goal to bridge this divide and bring the two sides closer together, my research focuses on the following question:
Under what circumstances do Debian package maintainers incorporate new tools or techniques into their workflow?
To answer this question, I plan to achieve the following objectives:
- to determine the salient influences to package maintainers' adoption or rejection decisions, develop an unambiguous and orthogonal (uncorrelated) terminology of factors to capture these influences, and identify clusters of factors to produce a framework.
- to apply this framework in the context of a number of previously adopted or rejected tools or techniques, as well as some which have only recently appeared on the radar screens, and to asses to what degree such instantiations of the framework reflect the real-world adoption rates.
Given a technology which improves the workflow of an aspect of Debian development, the framework can be used to estimate the rate of diffusion of this technology within the project. If this rate is unacceptably low, the framework can help to determine where to concentrate efforts to speed up the process.
I hypothesise that such a framework can be used to streamline Debian development and thus increase the efficiency of every contributor. Moreover, the framework should be applicable to other volunteer projects, and management science, where a trend exists towards treating employees as volunteers by giving them increased amounts of autonomy.
Please refer to the separate pages on the background of my research and my research approach.
Research documentation
I document the progress at various stages during my research endeavour. Such documents constitute a good reference for those who are interested in my research beyond the broad overview given on these pages. The series of documents also captures the evolution of the research itself, which hardly ever remains constant throughout its period. This also means that these documents do not necessarily reflect the current research. Ask me if you have any doubt or questions!
Initially, I put plans and theories into words and described intentions in research proposals. As a student of the British university system (used by the University of Limerick), I started off on the Masters track and had to convince a board of examiners that my research is at Ph.D. level before becoming a proper Ph.D. student.
- Research proposal, original version, 13 October 2005
- Research proposal, first revision, 11 August 2006
- Master to PhD track transfer report, 16 November 2007
