Decisions and Their Making in OSS Development: An Exploratory Study Using the Hibernate Developer Mailing List

Stakeholders make various decisions regarding requirements, architectural design, project management, etc. during the life cycle of software development. They have an interest in making high-quality and appropriate decisions that meet project objectives and maximize system benefits. However, decision-making in software development is not a trivial task and the decisions made are often not well documented. In this paper, we analyzed 9006 posts from the Hibernate developer mailing list, in order to explore (1) decision expression and (2) classification, (3) the rationale behind decision-making, (4) approaches employed in decision-making, (5) related software artifacts of decision-making, and (6) the trend of decision-making over time. The results show that (1) all decisions are expressed as Information Giving, Solution Proposal, and Feature Request; (2) the main categories of decisions are Design Decision and Requirement Decision; (3) the most common rationale behind decision-making is Non-functional Requirement; (4) the most commonly used decision-making approach is Problem Structuring; (5) the main categories of software artifacts related to decision-making are Design Document and Requirement Document; and (6) decision-making runs through the whole software development life cycle.