Computer Software Engineering and Technology Research on Open Source "Libre" Software:Theory, Techniques and Methodologies

With the discovery of Internet, the new ways of creating and/or developing software engineering have arisen that make use of computational telematic tools, utilities and techniques, follow flexible methodologies and incorporate third (or other) party contributions into software. One of the pragmatic and paradigmatic examples of software engineering development that counts on these characteristics can be found in the phenomenon of (free) open source software (i.e., un-licensed, licensed free called "libre") being of special interest, those projects that are large in number of participants and in size of software (source-code).

Albeit, at first, these novel environments are less preventable than those conventional/ traditional ones, because, creation and hence development is done usually in a geographically distributed way, but there is no solid company behind the development that takes lead, traditional hierarchical structures are not followed or external contributions are hardly predictable, we have access to much information. The software product itself, and many by products that are created/ designed, during the development process (e.g., communication archives, bug track systems and versioning systems, among others). These data usually publicly available on the Internet, therefore, we can make the extensive and hence exhaustive analysis with massive data, and much of it is cumbersome (too hardly obtainable in industrial and other environments). In this paper, we elucidate aims and objectives which are goals and discuss the rudimentary theory, data sources, techniques and methodologies that are proposed in our empirical software engineering research on open source called LIBRE software.