TY - GEN
T1 - Investigating Evolution in Open Source Software
AU - Greer, Desmond
AU - Greer, Desmond
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Lehman’s well-known laws of software evolution have existed since the early 1980’s and although they have been nuanced, augmented and discussed many times since then, software and software development practices have changed dramatically since then, not least due to the rise and popularity of open source software (OSS). OSS is written collaboratively with the process and products publically observable, whereas the original laws were derived based on a very different context. The question then arises if Lehman’s laws apply to modern day OSS software. The GitHub repository is the most comprehensive source of OSS projects and is used here to obtain data on how OSS projects have evolved. This work uses one hundred open source projects hosted on GitHub. Metrics are obtained via the provided API, using a purpose-built workbench and several of Lehman’s laws are evaluated using the data available. Coupled with a critique of how judgements can be made from the data available, the study has discovered that the evidence does not support many of the laws. An important proviso with such an approach is the limitation on what data can be extracted and/or inferred from the GitHub API. Nonetheless, there is enough of a challenge made to the laws to warrant further study and a need to revisit some of the laws in the context of open source development.
AB - Lehman’s well-known laws of software evolution have existed since the early 1980’s and although they have been nuanced, augmented and discussed many times since then, software and software development practices have changed dramatically since then, not least due to the rise and popularity of open source software (OSS). OSS is written collaboratively with the process and products publically observable, whereas the original laws were derived based on a very different context. The question then arises if Lehman’s laws apply to modern day OSS software. The GitHub repository is the most comprehensive source of OSS projects and is used here to obtain data on how OSS projects have evolved. This work uses one hundred open source projects hosted on GitHub. Metrics are obtained via the provided API, using a purpose-built workbench and several of Lehman’s laws are evaluated using the data available. Coupled with a critique of how judgements can be made from the data available, the study has discovered that the evidence does not support many of the laws. An important proviso with such an approach is the limitation on what data can be extracted and/or inferred from the GitHub API. Nonetheless, there is enough of a challenge made to the laws to warrant further study and a need to revisit some of the laws in the context of open source development.
KW - Empirical software engineering
KW - Open source software
KW - Repository mining
KW - Software evolution
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85068990939&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-24308-1_20
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-24308-1_20
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85068990939
SN - 9783030243074
VL - 11623
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 242
EP - 256
BT - Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2019 - 19th International Conference, 2019, Proceedings
A2 - Gervasi, Osvaldo
A2 - Stankova, Elena
A2 - Korkhov, Vladimir
A2 - Torre, Carmelo
A2 - Tarantino, Eufemia
A2 - Misra, Sanjay
A2 - Murgante, Beniamino
A2 - Rocha, Ana Maria A.C.
A2 - Taniar, David
A2 - Apduhan, Bernady O.
PB - Springer Nature Switzerland
CY - Switzerland
T2 - 19th International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, ICCSA 2019
Y2 - 1 July 2019 through 4 July 2019
ER -