Intensive metrics for the study of the evolution of open source projects: case studies from apache software foundation projects

Authors:
Santiago Gala-Pérez;Gregorio Robles;Jesús M. González-Barahona;Israel Herraiz
Affiliations:
Apache Software Foundation, Spain;Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain;Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain;Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Venue:
Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Year:
2013

Citing 11
Cited 0

Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Laws of Software Evolution Revisited

EWSPT '96 Proceedings of the 5th European Workshop on Software Process Technology
Metrics and Laws of Software Evolution - The Nineties View

METRICS '97 Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Software Metrics
Implications of Evolution Metrics on Software Maintenance

ICSM '98 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance
Mining email social networks

Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories
What Can OSS Mailing Lists Tell Us? A Preliminary Psychometric Text Analysis of the Apache Developer Mailing List

MSR '07 Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories
A survey and taxonomy of approaches for mining software repositories in the context of software evolution

Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice
Latent social structure in open source projects

Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering
An Approach to Analysis and Measurement of the Stability of Web Community Based on Dissipative Structure Theory and Information Entropy

ICNC '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Fifth International Conference on Natural Computation - Volume 06
On the central role of mailing lists in open source projects: an exploratory study

JSAI-isAI'09 Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on New frontiers in artificial intelligence
On the reproducibility of empirical software engineering studies based on data retrieved from development repositories

Empirical Software Engineering

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Based on the empirical evidence that the ratio of email messages in public mailing lists to versioning system commits has remained relatively constant along the history of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), this paper has as goal to study what can be inferred from such a metric for projects of the ASF. We have found that the metric seems to be an intensive metric as it is independent of the size of the project, its activity, or the number of developers, and remains relatively independent of the technology or functional area of the project. Our analysis provides evidence that the metric is related to the technical effervescence and popularity of project, and as such can be a good candidate to measure its healthy evolution. Other, similar metrics -like the ratio of developer messages to commits and the ratio of issue tracker messages to commits- are studied for several projects as well, in order to see if they have similar characteristics.