A Research Proposal: Tracking Open Source Software Evolution for the Characterization of Its Evolutionary Behavior

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) has attracted a lot of attention in the last decade. Due to the rising dominance of OSS in the software industry; not only practitioners, but researchers as well as academicians are also keen to understand the OSS development and evolution process. Several studies have been conducted in the past in this regard. Most of the existing work relates to growth analysis of OSS projects using source code level metrics. Lately, metrics related to change activity have also been included to understand OSS evolution. Change activity as recorded in Source Code Management (SCM) systems is used in a few cases. Most of the work deals with finding change size, and change effort distributions. A few studies do change profile analysis as OSS systems evolve. But that is restricted to a few of the change categories, e.g., adaptive v/s non-adaptive changes, corrective v/s non-corrective changes. This research study explores change profiles of 106 OSS systems by extracting change type information from their SCM repositories and then categorizing these changes automatically into five different categories - corrective, adaptive, perfective, preventive, and enhancement related. The idea is to understand the way OSS projects undergo change through long periods of time. The results indicate that change behavior of the OSS projects is different for different types of changes.