Using TransFlow to Analyze Open Source Developers' Evolution

Due to the success of many Open Source Software projects, both the industry and the academic community are interested in understanding how such software is produced. Particularly, there is interest in understanding how these communities are organized and maintained, and also how the contributors join and evolve their roles in these projects. However, few studies have been conducted around the evolution of the developers in the communities, i.e., how they reach roles of greater importance, and how the software changes over time through this evolution. This paper describes TransFlow a tool aimed to support the integrated study of the evolution of both: the software itself and the developers’ participation in open source projects. This integrated study is a requirement since the software architecture may support or hinder developers’ participation in the project. Transflow’s main features and architecture are described, as well as its evaluation with three open-source projects.