The massive emergence of Open Source Software (OSS) projects led to the rapid increment of data available to software engineers and those who would like to contribute to an OSS project. There is an arising need for a way to analyze and draw conclusions about the value of an OSS project, from an epistemic point of view. OSS projects have been used for a long time as vehicles for learning programming and software engineering. However, there is a need for more evidence about the scientific value conveyed by OSS projects. We posit that if we deeply study the dialogues of software engineers involved in the communities of the various projects and draw conclusions from them, this can be an additional way of assessing OSS projects. Learning analytics, data mining and data science provide diverse statistical and computational approaches to analyzing data. In this work, we describe Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA), a network analysis technique used by a growing community of researchers to support thick descriptions based on large volumes of data. ENA is based on the theory of epistemic frames. The theory of epistemic frames models the ways of being, thinking and acting inside some community of practice. In this research, we focus on the epistemic frame of software engineering and discuss the elements of this frame: the knowledge, the set of skills and values and the set of processes for making and justifying decisions. We coded the discourses of two well-known open source projects, LibreOffice and OpenOffice, and we used the online tool ENA WebKit to analyze the coded rows of the discourses, but also to visualize and compare the networks of different units of data. We conducted three types of experiments and comparisons on the mean networks of the two projects, on the networks of the different bugs, as well as on the networks of some software engineers who participated in the discussions, and we came to conclusions about how epistemic these dialogues were and therefore assessing their educational value. This is an introductory work utilizing the ENA method for OSS discourse analysis. We believe that the rational presented in this paper can lead to a set of processes on evaluating OSS projects based on their epistemology and at the same time, become an educational tool for software engineering courses and research groups.

Abstract Open source software (OSS) has been developing for more than two decades. It originated as a movement with the introduction of the first free/libre OSS operating system, became a popular trend among the developer community, led to enterprise solutions widely embraced by the global market, and began garnering attention from significant players in the software industry (such as IBM's acquisition of RedHat). Throughout the years, numerous software assessment models have been suggested, some of which were created specifically for OSS projects. Most of these assessment models focus on software quality and maintainability. Some models are taking under consideration health aspects of OSS projects. Despite the multitude of these models, there is yet to be a universally accepted model for assessing OSS projects. In this work, we aim to adapt the City Resilience Framework (CRF) for use in OSS projects to establish a strong theoretical foundation for OSS evaluation focusing on the project's resilience as it evolves over time. We would like to highlight that our goal with the proposed assessment model is not to compare two OSS solutions with each other, in terms of resilience, or even do a resilience ranking between the available OSS tools. We are aiming to investigate resilience of an OSS project as it evolves and identify possible opportunities of improvements in the four dimensions we are defining. These dimensions are as follows: source code, business and legal, integration and reuse, and social (community). The CRF is a framework that was introduced to measure urban resilience and most specifically how cities' resilience is changing as they evolve. We believe that a software evaluation model that focuses on resilience can complement the pre‐existing models based on software quality and software health. Although concepts that are related to resilience, like sustainability or viability, already appear in literature, to our best knowledge, there is no OSS assessment model that evaluates the resilience of an OSS project. We argue that cities and OSS projects are both dynamically evolving systems with similar characteristics. The proposed framework utilizes both quantitative and qualitative indicators, which is viewed as an advantage. Lastly, we would like to emphasize that the framework has been tested on the enterprise software domain as part of this study, evaluating five major versions of six OSS projects, Laravel, Composer, PHPMyAdmin, OKApi, PatternalPHP, and PHPExcel, the first three of which are intuitively considered resilient and the three latter nonresilient, to provide a preliminary validation of the models' ability to distinguish between resilient and not resilient projects.