Repeated Maintenance of Open-Source Software

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal studies the evolution and subsequent maintenance behavior of code in two very large open-source projects, Linux and GCC free software, to provide insight into the software engineering aspects of open-source software. Focusing on the coupling between components and how this coupling changes over time, successive versions of Linux and GCC are examined, analyzing the change from version to version of each product. The coupling between two units of a software product, a measure of the degree of interaction between those units, is used as a measure of maintainability. Tools are built to compute these changes in coupling, and the output from these tools will be subjected to statistical analysis. The research sheds light on the importance in software maintenance of the skill of the individual software engineer and ameliorates the lack of data as to the effectiveness of "open software" development as compared to commercial software development.