Request for Community Approval – Academic Survey on Software Quality in OSS Projects

[estebanalonsoaustral]

Dear Raylib community,
My name is Esteban Jorge Alonso, and I am a PhD researcher at Universidad Austral (Argentina) conducting a scientific study on software quality in open-source projects. This research explores how developers, maintainers, and contributors perceive and prioritize quality across three essential dimensions: Product, Process, and People – commonly referred to as the 3P model.
To support this investigation, I have developed a short and anonymous survey (approx. 10-15 minutes) aimed at contributors to OSS projects hosted on GitHub. The purpose is to gather informed perspectives that will help identify and refine quality metrics relevant to real-world software development practices.
Key information about the study includes:
• This project has received ethics approval as part of my doctoral research
• The survey is anonymous and does not collect personal data
• Results will be published as open-access academic output
If permitted by the community, I would like to share the survey link in a future post, along with the formal consent form and additional study details. I am not including any links in this message, as I wish to respect community norms and seek prior approval before proceeding.
I kindly ask for your guidance or approval on how to best proceed with this initiative within the Raylib community. Your input and support would be greatly appreciated, and I am of course open to any feedback or suggestions to ensure this request aligns with your norms and values.
Thank you very much in advance for your time and consideration.
Best regards,
Esteban Jorge Alonso
PhD Candidate – Universidad Austral (Argentina)
[email protected]

[raysan5]

Hi @estebanalonsoaustral, never received a similar request and it feels a bit confusing to me. Nowadays it's very difficult to differentiate a legit request from an AI-generated spam message.

Checking your profile, it has been just created today and raylib is the only open-source project receiving this kind of request... feels a bit akward to me... I'll wait until other open-source projects you contact reply to this request to make a decision. Thanks for your understanding.

[orcmid]

@raysan5 The description seems legitimate, although I'm uncertain about it being at the PhD candidate level. I am aware of a 5P model that is similar to the cited 3P model.

I think that this survey is going to be very difficult to the extent that open-source projects need not have any organizational structure and there need not be any community-shared goals or understanding with regard to product, process, and people.

It might make sense for those contributors that are permitted to approve pull requests and also make direct commits to the project. What might be thought of as the core team. That might just be you.

It might also be useful for @raysan5 to take the survey and see if it makes sense to offer it to the entire list of contributors. I suspect there are many here who have no idea what this is about, and the survey material might not make that understandable. It is not like there is a coherent vision among this community around the approach to raylib development, and certainly not any grouping that falls nicely into developers, maintainers, and contributors.

CC: @estebanalonsoaustral
PS: Esteban, what department are you conducting this research in?