Ioannis Samoladas
Abstract
A study of almost six million lines of code tracks how freely accessible source code holds up against time and multiple iterations.
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Index Terms
- Open source software development should strive for even greater code maintainability
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Reviews
Andrew Brooks
This paper reports on the measurement of the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Maintainability Index (MI) for five open source software (OSS) projects. MI is an averaging measure of code commenting, complexity, and size at the level of a module. The number of software releases measured varied from eight to 14. The smallest project studied had 343,000 lines of code. Figure 1 in the paper shows that a commercial spin-off of one OSS project had poorer values of MI. Figure 2 shows that one OSS project developed from a commercial project had MI values no worse than the original commercial release. Figure 3 shows a gradual deterioration over time of MI values for three other OSS projects. From these figures, the authors conclude that OSS code maintainability compares favorably with commercial code, and that the maintainability of OSS code deteriorates over time, much as with commercial code. Many analyses are missing. For example: the deterioration in MI for the commercial spin-off referenced in Figure 1 largely took place over one release. Knowing the reasons for this particular deterioration would be useful. Figures 2 and 3 demonstrate periods of relative stability in MI. Detailed comparisons between periods of relative stability and deterioration might reveal the underlying reasons for deterioration in MI. Maintainability is ultimately measured by the effort required to fulfill a change request, and many would view with skepticism findings based solely on the values of the MI metric. This paper is recommended to those researching software maintenance. Online Computing Reviews Service
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