文章基本信息

标题：The Economics of Community Open Source Software Projects: An Empirical Analysis of Maintenance Effort
本地全文：下载
作者：Eugenio Capra ; Chiara Francalanci ; Francesco Merlo 等
期刊名称：Advances in Software Engineering
印刷版ISSN：1687-8655
电子版ISSN：1687-8663
出版年度：2010
卷号：2010
DOI：10.1155/2010/685950
出版社：Hindawi Publishing Corporation
摘要：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.