About
24
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Introduction
Dr. Ann Barcomb is an assistant professor at the Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary. Her previous post was at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Dr. Barcomb received her PhD from the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 2019, with a specialization in software engineering, and a master's in information systems from Maastricht University, The Netherlands. In the course of her industry career, she worked as a software developer and as a community manager.
Additional affiliations
April 2019 - present
Publications
Publications (24)
![The QDAcity-RE process for structural domain modeling [30]](publication/353934005/figure/fig2/AS:1123575817871361@1644892758335/The-QDAcity-RE-process-for-structural-domain-modeling-30_Q320.jpg)
Using qualitative data analysis (QDA) to perform domain analysis and modeling has shown great promise. Yet, the evaluation of such approaches has been limited to single-case case studies. While these exploratory cases are valuable for an initial assessment, the evaluation of the efficacy of QDA to solve the suggested problems is restricted by the c...
Pattern discovery, the process of discovering previously unrecognized patterns, is often performed as an ad-hoc process with little resulting certainty in the quality of the proposed patterns. Pattern validation, the process of validating the accuracy of proposed patterns, remains dominated by the simple heuristic of "the rule of three". This artic...
Context: Over the last decades, open-source software has pervaded the software industry and has become one of the key pillars in software engineering. The incomparable growth of open source reflected that pervasion: Prior work described open source as a whole to be growing linearly, polynomially, or even exponentially.
Objective: In this study, we...
Companies without expertise in software development can opt to form consortia to develop open source software to meet their needs, as an alternative to the build-or-buy decision. Such user-led foundations are little understood, due to a limited number of published examples. In particular, almost nothing is known about the ecosystems surrounding use...
Companies without expertise in software development can opt to form consortia to develop open source software to meet their needs, as an alternative to the build-or-buy decision. Such user-led foundations are little understood, due to a limited number of published examples. In particular, almost nothing is known about the ecosystems surrounding use...
We draw on the concept of episodic volunteering (EV) from the general volunteering literature to identify practices for managing EV in free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) communities. Infrequent but ongoing participation is widespread, but the practices that community managers are using to manage EV, and their concerns about EV, have not been p...
https://dirkriehle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cs-fau-tr-2020-01.pdf
Pattern discovery, the process of discovering previously unrecognized patterns, is usually performed as an ad-hoc process with little resulting certainty in the quality of the proposed patterns. Pattern validation, the process ofvalidating the accuracy of proposed patterns, ha...
Interview analysis is a technique employed in qualitative research. Researchers annotate (code) interview transcriptions, often with the help of Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS). The tools available today largely replicate the manual process of annotation. In this article, we demonstrate how to use natural language proc...
When companies opt to open source their software, they may choose to offer the project to an open source foundation. Donating the software to an open source foundation offers a number of advantages, such as access to the foundation’s existing tools and project management. However, in donating the software, the company relinquishes control of the so...
https://ulir.ul.ie/handle/10344/8166
Free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) communities are commonly understood according to the Onion model. This thesis presents an alternative approach of understanding participation, the habitualepisodic lens drawn from the general volunteering literature. Episodic volunteering (EV) is an alternative way of und...
Successful Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects incorporate both habitual and infrequent, or episodic, contributors. Using the concept of episodic volunteering (EV) from the general volunteering literature, we derive a model consisting of five key constructs that we hypothesize affect episodic volunteers’ retention in FLOSS communit...
Managers can find it challenging to assess team members consistently and fairly. The ideal composition of qualities possessed by good team members depends on the organization, the team, and the manager. To enable managers to elucidate the qualities they require, we make use of an innovative methodology. This methodology is based on a multi-criteria...
Full text available here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8477174
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities are composed, in part, of volunteers, many of whom contribute infrequently. However, these infrequent volunteers contribute to the sustainability of FLOSS projects, and should ideally be encouraged to continue participatin...
Global software development has become the norm rather than the exception for even the smallest companies. However, global software development is known to lead to numerous negative effects among distributed teams. This paper focuses on the effect of global software development on motivation. Specifically we ask: “Does increased autonomy, through t...
In Multi-Criteria Decision Aiding, one of the current challenges involves the proper integration and tuning of the preference models in real-life contexts. In this article, we consider the multi-criteria sorting problem where the decision maker’s preferences fall within the outranking paradigm. Following recent advances on extensions of classical m...
Global software development has become the norm rather than the exception for even the smallest companies. But distributed development involving globally distributed teams in different countries and timezones introduces additional complexity into an already complex undertaking. Geographic distribution and timezone differences also introduce barrier...
Effective teaming depends on the abilities and attributes of the team members, and also on the the context of the organization and group. The importance of team member attributes varies with domain and within a profession. Team managers may display different preferences as to the ideal composition of qualities possessed by good team members.
To en...
Doctoral symposium paper. Episodic volunteers, who prefer short term engagement to habitual contributions, are present in Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities. Little is known about how they are viewed within their communities, how they view their communities, how community managers are managing them, or even how many episodic vo...
In qualitative research, results often emerge through an analysis process called coding. A common measure of validity of theories built through qualitative research is the agreement between different people coding the same materials. High intercoder agreement indicates that the findings are derived from the data as opposed to being relative results...
Doctoral symposium paper. Open source community management is largely ad-hoc and relies on practitioner guides. Yet there is a great deal of information about volunteer management in the general volunteering literature, open source literature and general volunteering guides which could be relevant to open source communities if it were categorized a...
Free/libre and open source software are frequently described as a single community or movement. The difference between free software and open source ideology may influence founders, resulting in different types of companies being created. Specifically, the relationship between free/libre software ideology and social entrepreneurships is investigate...
With the increasing prominence of open collaboration as found in free/libre/open source software projects and other joint production communities, potential participants need to acquire skills. How these skills are learned has received little research attention. This article presents a large-scale survey (5,309 valid responses) in which users and de...
Doctoral Symposium paper. The importance of volunteers in open source has led to the position of community manager becoming more common in foundations and projects. Yet the advice for volunteer management and retention is fragmented, incomplete, contradictory, and has not been empirically examined. Our aim is to fill this gap by creating a comprehe...
This research strives to address the gap in the literature surrounding companies which identify with the philosophical values associated with the Free Software movement, which have historically been associated with Open Source businesses.
Projects
Projects (3)
Investigate open source projects founded by companies, rather than individuals or communities.
The purpose of this research is to develop an inferred model of how managers evaluate team members based on the combination of qualities they possess, good and bad.
Project associated with my PhD work on episodic volunteering (EV) in a Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) context. My EASE 2016 Doctoral Symposium paper provides the best overview of the project: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2915970.2915972
My dissertation provides a more complete view of the project: https://ulir.ul.ie/bitstream/handle/10344/8166/Barcomb_2019_Retaining.pdf?sequence=4
