abstract: This thesis research attempts to observe, measure and visualize the communication patterns among developers of an open source community and analyze how this can be inferred in terms of progress of that open source project. Here I attempted to analyze the Ubuntu open source project's email data (9 subproject log archives over a period of five years) and focused on drawing more precise metrics from different perspectives of the communication data. Also, I attempted to overcome the scalability issue by using Apache Pig libraries, which run on a MapReduce framework based Hadoop Cluster. I described four metrics based on which I observed and analyzed the data and also presented the results which show the required patterns and anomalies to better understand and infer the communication. Also described the usage experience with Pig Latin (scripting language of Apache Pig Libraries) for this research and how they brought the feature of scalability, simplicity, and visibility in this data intensive research work. These approaches are useful in project monitoring, to augment human observation and reporting, in social network analysis, to track individual contributions. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2011

Metric collection process and Project Management activities cannot be performed in an integrated fashion on most of the software projects. In software engineering world, there are Project Management Tools that has embedded project metrics and there are various Metric Collection Tools that collect specific metrics for satisfying requirements of different software life cycle phase activities (Configuration Management, Requirements Management, Application Development tools etc.). These tools however are not communicating with each other with any interface or any common database. This thesis focuses on the development of a tool to define, export, collect and use metrics for software project planning, tracking and oversight processes. To satisfy these objectives, POMMES with functionalities of Generic Metric Definition, Collection, Analysis, and Import, Update and Export of Project Metrics from 3rd Party Project Management Tools is developed and implemented in a software organization during this thesis work.