Evaluating Maintainability Prejudices with a Large-Scale Study of Open-Source Projects

Exaggeration or context changes can render maintainability experience into prejudice. For example, JavaScript is often seen as least elegant language and hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions without prior empirical validation. We formulated 10 hypotheses about maintainability based on prejudices and test them in a large set of open-source projects (6,897 GitHub repositories, 402 million lines, 5 programming languages). We operationalize maintainability with five static analysis metrics. We found that JavaScript code is not worse than other code, Java code shows higher maintainability than C# code and C code has longer methods than other code. The quality of interface documentation is better in Java code than in other code. Code developed by teams is not of higher and large code bases not of lower maintainability. Projects with high maintainability are not more popular or more often forked. Overall, most hypotheses are not supported by open-source data.Comment: 20 page

Open Source BI Platforms: A Functional and Architectural Comparison

While in the past the BI market was strictly dominated by closed source and commercial tools, the last few years were characterized by the birth of open source solutions: first as single BI tools, and later as complete BI platforms. An Open Source BI platform provides a full spectrum of BI capabilities within a unified system that reduces the overhead for the development and management of each application, and lets the user feel like he/she was using a single BI solution. This paper proposes a comparative evaluation of three different Open Source BI platforms (namely JasperSoft, Pentaho and SpagoBI) aimed at understanding their current features, their future potentialities and their limits when adopted in real projects as well as a basis for research prototyping. Overall we try to understand if the open source phenomenon will be able to become a valid alternative to commercial platforms within the BI context

A spatiotemporal Data Envelopment Analysis (S-T DEA) approach:the need to assess evolving units

One of the major challenges in measuring efficiency in terms of resources and outcomes is the assessment of the evolution of units over time. Although Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has been applied for time series datasets, DEA models, by construction, form the reference set for inefficient units (lambda values) based on their distance from the efficient frontier, that is, in a spatial manner. However, when dealing with temporal datasets, the proximity in time between units should also be taken into account, since it reflects the structural resemblance among time periods of a unit that evolves. In this paper, we propose a two-stage spatiotemporal DEA approach, which captures both the spatial and temporal dimension through a multi-objective programming model. In the first stage, DEA is solved iteratively extracting for each unit only previous DMUs as peers in its reference set. In the second stage, the lambda values derived from the first stage are fed to a Multiobjective Mixed Integer Linear Programming model, which filters peers in the reference set based on weights assigned to the spatial and temporal dimension. The approach is demonstrated on a real-world example drawn from software development

Evaluating Process Quality Based on Change Request Data – An Empirical Study of the Eclipse Project

Abstract. The information routinely collected in change request management systems contains valuable information for monitoring of the process quality. However this data is currently utilized in a very limited way. This paper presents an empirical study of the process quality in the product portfolio of the Eclipse project. It is based on a systematic approach for the evaluation of process quality characteristics using change request data. Results of the study offer insights into the development process of Eclipse. Moreover the study allows assessing applicability and limitations of the proposed approach for the evaluation of process quality

Dynamical Simulation Models of the Open Source Development Process

This chapter will discuss attempts to produce formal mathematical models for dynamical simulation of the development process of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) projects. First, a brief overview for simulation methods of closed source software development is given. Then, based on empirical facts reported in F/OSS case studies, we describe a general framework for F/OSS dynamical simulation models and discuss its similarities and differences to closed source software simulation. A specific F/OSS simulation model is introduced. The model is applied to the Apache project and to the gtk+ module of the GNOME project, and simulation outputs are compared to real data. The potential of formal F/OSS simulation models to turn into practical tools used by F/OSS coordinators to predict key project factors is demonstrated. Finally, issues for further research and efforts for improvement of this first-attempt model are discussed. </jats:p

Dynamical Simulation Models of the Open Source Development Process

This chapter will discuss attempts to produce formal mathematical models for dynamical simulation of the development process of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) projects. First, a brief overview for simulation methods of closed source software development is given. Then, based on empirical facts reported in F/OSS case studies, we describe a general framework for F/OSS dynamical simulation models and discuss its similarities and differences to closed source software simulation. A specific F/OSS simulation model is introduced. The model is applied to the Apache project and to the gtk+ module of the GNOME project, and simulation outputs are compared to real data. The potential of formal F/OSS simulation models to turn into practical tools used by F/OSS coordinators to predict key project factors is demonstrated. Finally, issues for further research and efforts for improvement of this first-attempt model are discussed.</jats:p

Applying the submission multiple tier (SMT) matrix to detect impact on developer interest on open source project survivability

© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014. There is a significant relationship between project activity and developer interest on Open Source (OS) projects. Total project activity submission count number can be an indicator for gauging developer interest. The higher the project activity submission of a project is, the larger developer interest in a project. My paper proposed that applying a Submission Multiple Tier (SMT) matrix can detect the impact of developer interest on project activity. Results showed more volume of OS projects with low project activity than high. Activity submission results also showed that developers are more likely to review than correct projects, with the first priority to find and fix bugs. Further research is needed to determine the impact of project activity type on developer motivation to contribute, participate and support OS projects

Is it all lost? A study of inactive open source projects

Open Source Software (OSS) proponents suggest that when developers lose interest in their project, their last duty is to “hand it off to a competent successor.” However, the mechanisms of such a hand-off are not clear, or widely known among OSS developers. As a result, many OSS projects, after a certain long period of evolution, stop evolving, in fact becoming “inactive” or “abandoned” projects. This paper presents an analysis of the population of projects contained within one of the largest OSS repositories available (SourceForge.net), in order to describe how projects abandoned by their developers can be identified, and to discuss the attributes and characteristics of these inactive projects. In particular, the paper attempts to differentiate projects that experienced maintainability issues from those that are inactive for other reasons, in order to be able to correlate common characteristics to the “failure” of these projects