Evolution and Growth in Large Libre Software Projects

Abstract

Abstract

On the prediction of the evolution of libre software projects

“…We decided to obtain this metric because it has been traditionally used in the study of the evolution of libre software projects (as an example, we cite [15,24]). …”

“…From a first study by Godfrey [15], to the most recent works in the area [24], many libre software projects have been found to be growing with linear or superlinear patterns, in conflict with the first assumption. This questions the validity of these models in the case of some libre software projects.…”

“…Studies in this field prefer statistical regression techniques, as is the case of [12,15,18,24]. Regression models are convenient for extracting the main trend from the evolution curves, but they fail to predict the short term behavior of the project.…”

Towards a Theoretical Model for Software Growth

“…Traditionally, SLOC has been used in the empirical studies of libre software projects [13,8], while LOC, number of files, or some complexity modules are common in other domains.…”

“…This specifically includes all lines containing program headers, declarations, and executable and non-executable statements 3 Available at http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount 4 Available at http://libresoft.urjc.es/Tools/metrics We decided to obtain this metric because it has been traditionally used in the study of the evolution of libre (free / open source) software projects (as an example, we cite [5,13]). …”