FOSS AwardMSR 2019

In an effort to encourage research on understanding and improving FOSS (Free, Open Source Software), MSR has established the “FOSS Impact paper” award. The award will be granted to papers that show outstanding contributions to the FOSS community. For many years, the MSR community has leveraged public data from FOSS projects, and in the process the community has contributed new insights, tools and techniques to assist FOSS projects in different ways. This award recognizes and encourages such line of research.

Authors can self-nominate their research papers for the FOSS award, after which the dedicated committee will evaluate these papers.

How to self-nominate for the FOSS Award

Any paper that is notified as accepted in the MSR Technical Track (including all categories: Research Papers, Practice Experience, and Tool Track) can self-nominate for the FOSS Award. Those papers will be examined by the FOSS Award Committee, that will select awarded papers based on the impact of the paper (or the study, experience or tool described in it) on the FOSS (free, open source software) development community.

To self-nominate, authors will submit their paper (the same version that was reviewed, but with no double-blind provisions) to the FOSS Award track in EasyChair. When convenient, links to source code, reproducible packages, etc. related to the paper should appear in the paper, so that the FOSS Award Committee can inspect them.

When submitting their paper, authors will be requested to fill in a form, where they will explain the rationale for self-nominating the paper. This rationale should be written in terms of the impact of the paper on the FOSS development community: how it could benefit, or are already benefiting, from its results, the use of the tools described, the reported experience, etc.

Announcement of the awarded papers

The awarded papers will be announced during MSR. They could be one or more papers, but the Award could also be declared void.

For 2019, the track features one award and two mentions.

João Felipe Pimentel, Leonardo Murta, Vanessa Braganholo and Juliana Freire will receive the MSR FOSS Award for their paper “A Large-scale Study about Quality and Reproducibility of Jupyter Notebooks”. The paper contributes to learning important aspects of the current uses of a prominent FOSS community (people producing Python/Jupyter notebooks distributed as FOSS), and proposing specific actions to improve that situation.

Christoph Gote, Ingo Scholtes and Frank Schweitzer will receive a Special MSR Mention for their paper “git2net: Mining Time-Stamped Co-Editing Networks from Large git Repositories”. The authors contribute to the FOSS Community with their tool for improving the understanding of how developers co-edit files, demonstrated with FOSS projects. This has the potential of letting projects gain knowledge on their own important aspects.

Sven Amann, Hoan Nguyen, Sarah Nadi, Tien Nguyen and Mira Mezini will receive a Spacial MSR Mention for their paper “Investigating Next Steps in Static API-Misuse Detection”. The authors contribute to the FOSS Community, with their tool that helps to improve the understanding of problems when using APIs by performing source code analysis, demonstrated by analyzing FOSS projects.

Congratulations to the winners!

MSR 2018

Li Li, Jun Gao, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé, Lei Ma, Xin Xia, and Jacques Klein. 2018. Characterising deprecated Android APIs. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 254-264. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196398.3196419

Message from the Committee

Congratulations to the winners! The FOSS Award Committee has valued the practical contributions of the paper to the FOSS community, which have been tested with real FOSS projects, and the potential of the framework presented in the paper for future use by the FOSS community.

The paper was selected among the ten papers for the MSR 2018 Technical Track that were self-nominated for this award. The members of the FOSS Award Committee (all of them FOSS experts) provided feedback for all papers, with at least three members providing feedback for each one. The chairs considered this feedback, and selected the awarded paper among the top papers in the ranking by the Committee, taking into account the award’s purpose: “The award will be granted to papers that show outstanding contributions to the FOSS community.”