Development effort estimation in free/open source software from activity in version control systems

Abstract

Effort estimation models are a fundamental tool in software management, and used as a forecast for resources, constraints and costs associated to software development. For Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, effort estimation is especially complex: professional developers work alongside occasional, volunteer developers, so the overall effort (in person-months) becomes non-trivial to determine. The objective of this work it to develop a simple effort estimation model for FOSS projects, based on the historic data of developers’ effort. The model is fed with direct developer feedback to ensure its accuracy. After extracting the personal development profiles of several thousands of developers from 6 large FOSS projects, we asked them to fill in a questionnaire to determine if they should be considered as full-time developers in the project that they work in. Their feedback was used to fine-tune the value of an effort threshold, above which developers can be considered as full-time. With the help of the over 1,000 questionnaires received, we were able to determine, for every project in our sample, the threshold of commits that separates full-time from non-full-time developers. We finally offer guidelines and a tool to apply our model to FOSS projects that use a version control system.

Research on Structured Extraction Method for Function Points Based on Event Extraction

“…The SLOC method estimates the software size based on the length of code lines, while it cannot be applied in the early phase of software development. Robles G et al proposed a workload estimation model that depends on the threshold value of open-source software projects, and on the analysis of its publicly available project code data on version control systems [11]. Moreover, the number of code lines mainly depends on the programming language, which leads to inconsistent results in different programming environments.…”

How Are Paid and Volunteer Open Source Developers Different? A Study of the Rust Project

“…In their study on effort estimation in OSS, Robles et al [65] distinguished between full-time and non-full-time developers, which implies that those who are full-time are paid by their employer to contribute to OSS projects, whereas those who are non-full-time may be either paid or volunteer. Barcomb et al argued that from a community's perspective, volunteers may be indistinguishable from non-volunteers [5].…”

Creating A Security Baseline and Cybersecurity Framework for the Internet of Things Via Security Controls

“…Otherwise, developers must revert to the basic foundation when they begin a new application or hardware. Using a widely accepted Processor, chipset, kernel, operating system, libraries, and API is preferable and recommended to avoid unnecessary errors that arise from creating everything from the ground up [18], [20]. Despite focusing on small form factors, IoT developers often emphasize the importance of using a system of architecture they trust and are familiar with [21].…”