The article, published in the International Journal of Open Source Systems and Processes, reviews the ways in which researchers use email to study the software development process.
Email communication between software developers and users is a valuable artifact of the free, libre and open source software (FLOSS) development process. In her paper, How the FLOSS research community uses email archives (DOI: 10.4018/jossp.2012010103), Squire reviews the ways in which email is studied by computer scientists who are trying to learn how software is made.
Squire reviewed and classified 72 papers written about the use of email in crafting open source software. By performing this meta-analysis, Squire is better able to understand how the research community is using the email artifacts. This understanding will directly enable her to design a more efficient and effective infrastructure to collect, store, and analyze FLOSS emails as part of the ongoing FLOSSmole data sharing project.