The Economics of Open Source Software: An Empirical Analysis of Maintenance Costs

Capra, Eugenio; Francalanci, Chiara; Merlo, Francesco

doi:10.1109/icsm.2007.4362652

Cited by 10 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 31 publications

(49 reference statements)

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“…Therefore, another perspective in understanding OSS evolution trends is to analyze how software has evolved in terms of development and maintenance costs. Capra et al [19] analyzes the quality degradation effect, i.e., entropy of OSS by measuring the evolution of maintenance costs over time. The metric used in this study is function points.…”

Section: Software Maintenance and Evolution Economicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Systematic Review of Studies of Open Source Software Evolution

Breivold¹,

Chauhan

Babar

2010

2010 Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference

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Software evolution relates to how software systems evolve over time. With the emergence of the open source paradigm, researchers are provided with a wealth of data for open source software evolution analysis. In this paper, we present a systematic review of open source software (OSS) evolution. The objective of this review is to obtain an overview of the existing studies in open source software evolution, with the intention of achieving an understanding of how software evolvability (i.e., a software system's ability to easily accommodate changes) is addressed during development and evolution of open source software. The primary studies for this review were identified based on a pre-defined search strategy and a multi-step selection process. Based on their research topics, we have identified four main categories of themes: software trends and patterns, evolution process support, evolvability characteristics addressed in OSS evolution, and examining OSS at software architecture level. A comprehensive overview and synthesis of these categories and related studies is presented as well.

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Section: Software Maintenance and Evolution Economicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Systematic Review of Studies of Open Source Software Evolution

Breivold¹,

Chauhan

Babar

2010

2010 Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference

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“…If bug corrections are made too close to the release date, the overall quality of the bug fixing process can be worse, due to the possible inaccuracy of interventions and scarce documentation of changes. As noted by Capra et al [4], these are some of the most relevant causes that contribute to increase software entropy, which is proved to negatively affect overall software quality and increase maintenance costs.…”

Section: Empirical Analyses and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Empirical Analysis of the Bug Fixing Process in Open Source Projects

Francalanci

Merlo

2008

IFIP – The International Federation for Information Processing

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Monitoring the performance of processes is often considered critical in classic engineering fields. However, in the area of software engineering (and especially in the Open Source context) it seems that the literature has not yet taken into consideration the problem of identifying the process characteristics and performance of debugging. The aim of this paper is the identification of the performance characteristics of the bug fixing process of Open Source applications, focusing on continuity and efficiency indicators. The importance of such indicators is even more relevant today, since Open Source software is now adopted also in many business contexts. We have analyzed the debugging process of 9 active and popular Open Source projects, collecting a dataset comprising more than 65,000 closed bugs. Results have highlighted four types of bug fixing processes that can be distinguished by considering temporal continuity and efficiency dimensions.

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“…6) comparing our approach with previous effort estimation techniques for FLOSS projects, as the one proposed in [6] based on the measure of entropy to calculate maintenance costs.…”

Section: Conclusion Discussion and Fu-ture Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating development effort in Free/Open source software projects by mining software repositories: a case study of OpenStack

Robles

González-Barahona

Cervigón

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

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Because of the distributed and collaborative nature of free / open source software (FOSS) projects, the development effort invested in a project is usually unknown, even after the software has been released. However, this information is becoming of major interest, especially -but not onlybecause of the growth in the number of companies for which FOSS has become relevant for their business strategy. In this paper we present a novel approach to estimate effort by considering data from source code management repositories. We apply our model to the OpenStack project, a FOSS project with more than 1,000 authors, in which several tens of companies cooperate. Based on data from its repositories and together with the input from a survey answered by more than 100 developers, we show that the model offers a simple, but sound way of obtaining software development estimations with bounded margins of error.

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The Economics of Open Source Software: An Empirical Analysis of Maintenance Costs

Cited by 10 publications

References 31 publications

A Systematic Review of Studies of Open Source Software Evolution

A Systematic Review of Studies of Open Source Software Evolution

Empirical Analysis of the Bug Fixing Process in Open Source Projects

Estimating development effort in Free/Open source software projects by mining software repositories: a case study of OpenStack

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