As part of our ongoing
efforts to support the open source and academic communities, Google provides funding to
researchers investigating open source software development. Over the last 3.5 years, Martin
Michlmayr, a former leader of the Debian project, has investigated aspects of release
management in volunteer open source projects. Martin is studying for a PhD degree and his work
is in part supported by Google. His particular interest is in quality improvement and he's
therefore investigating problems that occur with release management and ways to solve
them.
As he's nearing the completion of this PhD, Martin has started
writing about the findings from his research. He has published a series of seven postings in
his blog in which he presents
the open source projects he studied. For each project, he briefly summarizes what
problems the project faced in the past, what changes they have implemented to address these
problems, and what outstanding problems they still have.
