Paper Info
Title
On the prediction of the evolution of libre software projects
Abstract
Libre (free / open source) software development is a complex phenomenon. Many actors (core developers, casual contributors, bug reporters, patch submitters, users, etc.), in many cases volunteers, interact in complex patterns without the constrains of formal hierarchical structures or organizational ties. Understanding this complex behavior with enough detail to build explanatory models suitable for prediction is an open challenge, and few results have been published to date in this area. Therefore statistical, non-explanatory models (such as the traditional regression model) have a clear role, and have been used in some evolution studies. Our proposal goes in this direction, but using a model that we have found more useful: time series analysis. Data available from the source code management repository is used to compute the size of the software over its past life, using this information to estimate the future evolution of the project. In this paper we present this methodology and apply it to three large projects, showing how in these cases predictions are more accurate than regression models, and precise enough to estimate with little error their near future evolutions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362653
2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance
Keywords
Field
DocType
libre software projects,open source software,formal hierarchical structures,time series analysis,source code management
Software analytics,Software engineering,Systems engineering,Computer science,Software peer review,Software project management,Software quality,Software visualization,Software construction,Software sizing,Software development
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1063-6773
978-1-4244-1255-6
22
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.82
16
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Israel Herraiz150326.83
Jesús M. González-barahona246235.96
Gregorio Robles3129491.67
Daniel M. Germán462537.22