Empirical Analysis of the Complexity Evolution in Open-Source Software Systems

Abstract

When the software system evolves, its scale is increasingly growing to the degree where it is very hard to handle. Measuring the internal quality of the source code is one of the goals of making software development an engineering practice. Source Lines of Code (SLOC) and Cyclomatic Complexity (CC) are usually considered indicators of the complexity of a software system. Software complexity is an essential characteristic of a software system where it plays an important role in its success or failure. Although understanding the complexity is very important, yet it is not clear how complexity evolves in open source systems. In this paper, we study the complexity evolution of five open source projects from different domains. We analyze the growth of ten releases of these systems and show how complexity evolves over time. We then show how these systems conform to the second Lehman's law of software evolution.