论文标题
一项在不断发展的开源软件中可维护性的研究
A Study of Maintainability in Evolving Open-Source Software
论文作者
论文摘要
我们的研究重点是评估开源软件的长期演变的上下文。根据ISO 9126和最近的ISO 25010等良好的软件质量模型，维护性仍然是关键质量特征以及性能，安全性和可靠性。为了实现我们的目标，我们选择了三个复杂的，广泛使用的目标应用程序，可访问其整个开发历史记录和源代码。为了实现交叉应用比较，我们将选择限制为Java平台上开发的GUI驱动软件。我们将考试重点放在已发布的版本上，从而在我们的案例研究中包含了111个软件版本。这些应用程序涵盖了十多年的开发。对于每个版本，我们使用三种不同的复杂性定量模型来确定其可维护性。我们检查了软件大小和可维护性之间的关系，并研究了软件可维护性重要更改的主要驱动因素。我们使用手动源代码检查将发现与我们的发现相关联。我们还在包装级进行了更细的粒度评估，以确定应用程序源代码中可维护性问题的分布。最后，我们提供了交叉应用分析，以确定常见和特定于应用的模式。
Our study is focused on an evaluation of the maintainability characteristic in the context of the long-term evolution of open-source software. According to well established software quality models such as the ISO 9126 and the more recent ISO 25010, maintainability remains among key quality characteristics alongside performance, security and reliability. To achieve our objective, we selected three complex, widely used target applications for which access to their entire development history and source code was available. To enable cross-application comparison, we restricted our selection to GUI-driven software developed on the Java platform. We focused our examination on released versions, resulting in 111 software releases included in our case study. These covered more than 10 years of development for each of the applications. For each version, we determined its maintainability using three distinct quantitative models of varying complexity. We examined the relation between software size and maintainability and studied the main drivers of important changes to software maintainability. We contextualized our findings using manual source code examination. We also carried out a finer grained evaluation at package level to determine the distribution of maintainability issues within application source code. Finally, we provided a cross-application analysis in order to identify common as well as application-specific patterns.
