Ann Barcomb

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Calgary

Requirements Engineering (RE) is essential for developing complex and regulated software projects. Given the challenges in transforming stakeholder inputs into consistent software designs, Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) provides a systematic approach to handling free-form data. However, traditional QDA methods are time-consuming and heavily relian...

Background: Diversity, equity, and inclusion are rooted in the very origins of software engineering, shaped by the contributions from many individuals from underrepresented groups to the field. Yet today, DEI efforts in the industry face growing resistance. As companies retreat from visible commitments, pushback initiatives started only a few years...

Although it has been more than four decades that the first components-based software development (CBSD) studies were conducted, there is still no standard method or tool for component selection which is widely accepted by the industry. The gulf between industry and academia contributes to the lack of an accepted tool. We conducted a mixed methods s...

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...

Underrepresentation is widespread in the software industry, resulting in problems for society, companies, and individuals. People in the technology industry who belong to underrepresented groups are using six capabilities to develop and harness their potential: perseverance, learning, work experience, communication, curiosity, and empathy. However,...

Background. Women bring unique problem-solving skills to software development, often favoring a holistic approach and attention to detail. In software testing, precision and attention to detail are essential as professionals explore system functionalities to identify defects. Recognizing the alignment between these skills and women's strengths can...

Context. Women remain significantly underrepresented in software engineering, leading to a lasting gender gap in the software industry. This disparity starts in education and extends into the industry, causing challenges such as hostile work environments and unequal opportunities. Addressing these issues is crucial for fostering an inclusive and di...

The intersection of ageism and sexism can create a hostile environment for veteran software developers belonging to marginalized genders. In this study, we conducted 14 interviews to examine the experiences of people at this intersection, primarily women, in order to discover the strategies they employed in order to successfully remain in the field...

Almost all software, open or closed, builds on open source software and therefore needs to comply with the license obligations of the open source code. Not knowing which licenses to comply with poses a legal danger to anyone using open source software. This article investigates the extent of inconsistencies between licenses declared by an open sour...

As engineering educators seek to prepare students for future careers, it can be challenging to keep course materials current with industry practices and knowledge. Students also often experience a disconnect between their studies and perceived relevance to future industry roles. This study examines the potential impact of an industry-academia colla...

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...

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.