Abstract
Recently, open source software (OSS) are adopted various situations because of quick delivery, cost reduction and standardization of systems. Many OSS are developed under the peculiar development style known as bazaar method. According to this method, faults are detected and fixed by users and developers around the world, and the fixed result will be reflected in the next release. Also, the fix time of faults tends to be shorter as the development of OSS progresses. However, several large-scale open source projects have a problem that faults fixing takes a lot of time because faults corrector cannot handle many faults reports quickly. Furthermore, imperfect fault fixing sometimes occurs because the fault fixing is performed by various people and environments. Therefore, OSS users and project managers need to know the stability degree of open source projects by grasping the fault fixing time. In this paper, for assessment stability of large-scale open source project, we derive the imperfect fault fixing probability and the transition probability distribution. For derivation, we use the software reliability growth model based on the Wiener process considering that the fault fixing time in open source projects changes depending on various factors such as the fault reporting time and the assignees for fixing faults. In addition, we applied the proposed model to actual open source project data and examined the validity of the model.
Highlights
Source codes of open source software (OSS) are freely available for use, reuse, fix and redistribution by the OSS users
In general, the prediction of development effort and fixing time for individual faults can assess by using conventional OSS reliability evaluation methods
There is no researches in terms of the estimation of the fault fixing time for a long time
Summary
Source codes of open source software (OSS) are freely available for use, reuse, fix and redistribution by the OSS users. We derive the imperfect fault fixing probability and the transition probability distribution of the model used in this study in OSS development for assessing project stability. We derive the imperfect fault fixing probability and the transition probability distribution considering the characteristics of open source projects. It is possible to grasp the future project progress by considering an arbitrary cumulative fixing time as the transition probability distribution It will be useful for OSS users to understand the required total cumulative fixing time α, because it is beneficial for OSS users to select the high-reliable OSS. We can evaluate the stability of open source projects by deriving the accumulated fault fixing time, the remaining fault fixing time, the transition probability distribution of the proposed models, and the probability of imperfect fault fixing. Application of Proposed Method to Actual Data We discuss the applicability as a method for evaluating the stability of a project by applying actual open source project data to the proposed model
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