Discovering maintainability changes in large software systems

Molnar, Arthur-Jozsef; Motogna, Simona

doi:10.1145/3143434.3143447

Cited by 11 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 6 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…R R RQ Q Q 3 : Do differences exist between the maintainability scores reported for the same software version? Existing research (Molnar and Motogna, 2017) has shown this as an important possibility. Given that each quality model uses its own scale, we identify those versions where differences exist in the maintainability change between the last and current studied version.…”

Section: Research Objectivementioning

confidence: 98%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Longitudinal Evaluation of Open-source Software Maintainability

Molnar

Motogna

2020

Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present a longitudinal study on the long-term evolution of maintainability in open-source software. Quality assessment remains at the forefront of both software research and practice, with many models and assessment methodologies proposed and used over time. Some of them helped create and shape standards such as ISO 9126 and 25010, which are well established today. Both describe software quality in terms of characteristics such as reliability, security or maintainability. An important body of research exists linking these characteristics with software metrics, and proposing ways to automate quality assessment by aggregating software metric values into higher-level quality models. We employ the Maintainability Index, technical debt ratio and a maintainability model based on the ARiSA Compendium. Our study covers the entire 18 year development history and all released versions for three complex, open-source applications. We determine the maintainability for each version using the proposed models, we compare obtained results and use manual source code examination to put them into context. We examine the common development patterns of the target applications and study the relation between refactoring and maintainability. Finally, we study the strengths and weaknesses of each maintainability model using manual source code examination as the baseline.

show abstract

Section: Research Objectivementioning

confidence: 98%

“…As the MI was proposed in the '90s, it does not consider object orientation, which emphasized new relations, such as inheritance, coupling and cohesion to the forefront. These were proven to have significant impact on maintainability (Chidamber and Kemerer, 1994;Li and Henry, 1993;Marinescu, 2002;Molnar and Motogna, 2017).…”

Section: Maintainability Indexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Longitudinal Evaluation of Open-source Software Maintainability

Molnar

Motogna

2020

Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…New metrics are being defined in order to fine-tune the characteristics of software systems, and in order to better reflect the properties of source code and associated artefacts. Examples include approaches to improve estimation of the maintenance effort [31], in order to supersede existing measures such as the Maintainability Index [26] which was shown to be outdated [16,30,11]. Other studies propose new metrics to better capture system coupling or cohesion [10,1].…”

Section: Metricsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of Software Product Quality Metrics

Molnar

Neamţu

Motogna

2020

Communications in Computer and Information Science

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Computing devices and associated software govern everyday life, and form the backbone of safety critical systems in banking, healthcare, automotive and other fields. Increasing system complexity, quickly evolving technologies and paradigm shifts have kept software quality research at the forefront. Standards such as ISO's 25010 express it in terms of sub-characteristics such as maintainability, reliability and security. A significant body of literature attempts to link these subcharacteristics with software metric values, with the end goal of creating a metricbased model of software product quality. However, research also identifies the most important existing barriers. Among them we mention the diversity of software application types, development platforms and languages. Additionally, unified definitions to make software metrics truly language-agnostic do not exist, and would be difficult to implement given programming language levels of variety. This is compounded by the fact that many existing studies do not detail their methodology and tooling, which precludes researchers from creating surveys to enable data analysis on a larger scale. In our paper, we propose a comprehensive study of metric values in the context of three complex, open-source applications. We align our methodology and tooling with that of existing research, and present it in detail in order to facilitate comparative evaluation. We study metric values during the entire 18-year development history of our target applications, in order to capture the longitudinal view that we found lacking in existing literature. We identify metric dependencies and check their consistency across applications and their versions. At each step, we carry out comparative evaluation with existing research and present our results.

show abstract

“…We decided to analyse software maintainability change following the approach proposed in [17] for the jEdit open source project using the JHawk tool to get useful insights. jEdit is an open source project developed in Java available in SourceForge 1 with all existing versions with the related source code.…”

Section: Our Investigationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are in total 41 versions but they have almost no differences compared to the selected ones. A significant difference compared to [17] is that we rely on general information outside the source code to examine and find potential relation between version numbers and changes to maintainability during the evolution of the project.…”

Section: Our Investigationmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Analysis of the Maintainability Evolution of Open Source Systems

Kapllani

Khomyakov

Mirgalimova

et al. 2020

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Maintainability is a key factor for the evolution of an open source system due to the highly distributed development teams that contribute to many projects. In the literature there are a number of different approaches that has been developed to evaluate the maintainability of a product but almost each method has been developed in an independent way without leveraging on the existing work and with almost no independent evaluation of the performance of the models. In most of the cases, the models are only validated through a limited set of projects only by the people that propose the specific approach. This paper is a first step towards a different direction focusing on the independent application of the existing models to popular open source projects.

show abstract

Discovering maintainability changes in large software systems

Cited by 11 publications

References 6 publications

Longitudinal Evaluation of Open-source Software Maintainability

Longitudinal Evaluation of Open-source Software Maintainability

Evaluation of Software Product Quality Metrics

An Empirical Analysis of the Maintainability Evolution of Open Source Systems

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About