Event-based monitoring of open source software projects

Project management traditionally has a strong focus on human reporting that fits well a tightly coupled form of organization to ensure the quality of project reporting. For loosely coupled forms of organization, such as open source systems (OSS) development projects, there are very few approaches to ensure the quality of project reporting; a promising approach can be to augment human reporting with data analysis based on the communication and state changes in an OSS project. In this paper we propose a concept and an initial measurement approach for event-based monitoring of OSS projects to better understand the actual benefit of tool-supported gathering, correlating and analyzing processes event data from the OSS community as a supplement for traditional software project monitoring data collection. We report on an empirical feasibility study investigating success and risk indicators of five OSS projects listed in the Apache Incubator.