Evaluating Lehman’s Laws of software evolution within software product lines industrial projects

Oliveira, Raphael Pereira de; Santos, Alcemir Rodrigues; Almeida, Eduardo Santana de; Gomes, Gecynalda Soares da Silva

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2016.07.038

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Analysis of 30 PHP projects shows that laws I, and III to VI are confirmed, but other three laws lack conclusive evidence. Oliveira et al (2015) validate the Lehman's laws in the context of Software Product Lines (SPL). The SPL product that they use for evaluation is an industrial medical software system.…”

Section: Declining Qualitymentioning

confidence: 76%

Open Source Software Evolution

Chahal

Saini

2016

International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes

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This paper presents the results of a systematic literature review conducted to understand the Open Source Software (OSS) development process on the basis of evidence found in the empirical research studies. The study targets the OSS project evolution research papers to understand the methods and techniques employed for analysing the OSS evolution process. Our results suggest that there is lack of a uniform approach to analyse and interpret the results. The use of prediction techniques that just extrapolate the historic trends into the future should be a conscious task as it is observed that there are no long-term correlations in data of such systems. OSS evolution as a research area is still in nascent stage. Even after a number of empirical studies, the field has failed to establish a theory. There is need to formalize the field as a systematic and formal approach can produce better software.

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Section: Declining Qualitymentioning

confidence: 76%

Open Source Software Evolution

Chahal

Saini

2016

International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes

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“…Finally, some of our empirical findings on knowledge barriers challenge conventional wisdom, warranting further investigation to more fully understand the nature of the relationships they represent. The negative effect of STIN raises some concerns about the potential negative impacts associated with necessary maintenance efforts in software projects intended to reduce the complexity of the codebase, such as refactoring (Lehman, 1979;Oliveira et al, 2017;Vassallo et al, 2019). Community managers must be aware that such efforts can deter newcomers from contributing, and if improperly managed or used extensively, they could have negative consequences for the sustainability of OSS communities by limiting newcomer participation.…”

Section: Newcomer Contribution Costsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Limitations and Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

An empirical examination of newcomer contribution costs in established OSS communities: a knowledge-based perspective

AlMarzouq

Grover

Thatcher

et al. 2023

INTR

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PurposeTo remain sustainable, open source software (OSS) projects must attract new members—or newcomers—who make contributions. In this paper, the authors develop a set of hypotheses based on the knowledge barriers framework that examines how OSS communities can encourage contributions from newcomers.Design/methodology/approachEmploying longitudinal data from the source code repositories of 232 OSS projects over a two-year period, the authors employ a Poisson-based mixed model to test how community characteristics, such as the main drivers of knowledge-based costs, relate to newcomers' contributions.FindingsThe results indicate that community characteristics, such as programming language choice, documentation effort and code structure instability, are the main drivers of knowledge-based contribution costs. The findings also suggest that managing these costs can result in more inclusive OSS communities, as evidenced by the number of contributing newcomers; the authors highlight the importance of maintaining documentation efforts for OSS communities.Originality/valueThis paper assumes that motivational factors are a necessary but insufficient condition for newcomer participation in OSS projects and that the cost to participation should be considered. Using the knowledge barriers framework, this paper identifies the main knowledge-based costs that hinder newcomer participation. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first empirical study that does not limit data collection to a single hosting platform (e.g., SourceForge), which improves the generalizability of the findings.

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“…Although the word improvement appears in the definition, a little emphasis is placed on feedback from customers, investors, and other stakeholders, which is a fundamental element in the contemporary continuous software engineering practices and processes [8], [21]. By and large, these feedback mechanisms have constituted an enduring challenge for empirical software evolution research in general [22], [23]. This gap in the literature is noteworthy because the availability of information about releases has increased substantially in recent years.…”

Section: A Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

How PHP Releases Are Adopted in the Wild?

Ruohonen

Leppänen

2017

2017 24th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)

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This empirical paper examines the adoption of PHP releases in the the contemporary world wide web. Motivated by continuous software engineering practices and software traceability improvements for release engineering, the empirical analysis is based on big data collected by web crawling. According to the empirical results based on discrete time-homogeneous Markov chain (DTMC) analysis, (i) adoption of PHP releases has been relatively uniform across the domains observed, (ii) which tend to also adopt either old or new PHP releases relatively infrequently. Although there are outliers, (iii) downgrading of PHP releases is generally rare. To some extent, (iv) the results vary between the recent history from 2016 to early 2017 and the long-run evolution in the 2010s. In addition to these empirical results, the paper contributes to the software evolution and release engineering research traditions by elaborating the applied use of DTMCs for systematic empirical tracing of online software deployments.

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Evaluating Lehman’s Laws of software evolution within software product lines industrial projects

Cited by 10 publications

References 21 publications

Open Source Software Evolution

Open Source Software Evolution

An empirical examination of newcomer contribution costs in established OSS communities: a knowledge-based perspective

How PHP Releases Are Adopted in the Wild?

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