Abstract
Previous contributions in the empirical software engineering literature have consistently observed a quality degradation effect of proprietary code as a consequence of maintenance. This degradation effect, referred to as entropy effect, has been recognized to be responsible for significant increases in maintenance effort. In the Open Source context, the quality of code is a fundamental design principle. As a consequence, the maintenance effort of Open Source applications may not show a similar increasing trend over time. The goal of this paper is to empirically verify the entropy effect for a sample of 4,289 community Open Source application versions. Analyses are based on the comparison with an estimate of effort obtained with a traditional effort estimation model. Findings indicate that community Open Source applications show a slower growth of maintenance effort over time, and, therefore, are less subject to the entropy effect.
Highlights
Authors in the software economics field concur that there exists a tradeoff between development and maintenance costs [1,2,3]
Findings indicate that community Open Source applications show a slower growth of maintenance effort over time, and, are less subject to the entropy effect
A physical source lines of code (SLOC) has been defined as a line ending in a newline or end-of-file marker, and which contains at least one nonwhitespace noncomment character
Summary
Authors in the software economics field concur that there exists a tradeoff between development and maintenance costs [1,2,3]. If development budgets are tight, subsequent maintenance operations will be more costly. Understanding, modeling, and empirically verifying this tradeoff have always been important research issues in the empirical software engineering literature. The cost efficiency of maintenance operations is affected by many factors. A fundamental cost driver is the quality of code [3]. A quality degradation effect of code has been observed as a consequence of maintenance operations [4, 5]. Maintenance operations have been found to increase coupling, reduce modularity, create a gap between actual code and documentation and, more generally, make code more “chaotic”. The cost of maintenance operations tends to grow over time
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