A Data Extraction Algorithm from Open Source Software Project Repositories for Building Duration Estimation Models: Case Study of Github

Donatien K Moulla,Alain Abran,Kol Yang

doi:10.5121/ijsea.2020.11603

Abstract

Software project estimation is important for allocating resources and planning a reasonable work schedule. Estimation models are typically built using data from completed projects. While organizations have their historical data repositories, it is difficult to obtaintheir collaboration due to privacy and competitive concerns. To overcome the issue of public access to private data repositories this study proposes an algorithm to extract sufficient data from the GitHub repository for building duration estimation models. More specifically, this study extracts and analyses historical data on WordPress projects to estimate OSS project duration using commits as an independent variable as well as an improved classification of contributors based on the number of active days for each contributor within a release period. The results indicate that duration estimation models using data from OSS repositories perform well and partially solves the problem of lack of data encountered in empirical research in software engineering.

Highlights

Software project estimation has always been a challenge for software engineering communities [1, 2]
The rationale behind selecting these datasets is related to their significance within the empirical software engineering research: the COCOMO81, Desharnais and Kemerer datasets have been the most widely used in software effort estimation [25]
This paper proposes an algorithm to extract relevant data from the GitHub repository for building duration estimation models

Summary

Introduction

Software project estimation has always been a challenge for software engineering communities [1, 2]. The performance of an estimation model depends on the characteristics of the software project data such as size, missing values and outliers, as well as the validation techniques used (leave-one-out cross validation, holdout, n-fold cross validation) and evaluation criteria [1]. Some organizations such as the International Software Benchmarking Standard Group (ISBSG) and PROMISE provide worldwide repositories of software projects [3, 4].

Results

Discussion

Conclusion