论文标题
开源软件可维护性的纵向评估
Longitudinal Evaluation of Open-Source Software Maintainability
论文作者
论文摘要
我们提出了一项关于开源软件中可维护性的长期演变的纵向研究。质量评估仍然是软件研究和实践的最前沿，随着时间的推移，提出和使用的许多模型和评估方法。其中一些帮助创建和塑造了如今已建立的ISO 9126和25010等标准。两者都以可靠性，安全性或可维护性等特性来描述软件质量。重要的研究存在将这些特征与软件指标联系起来，并提出通过将软件度量值汇总到高级质量模型中来自动化质量评估的方法。我们采用基于ARISA汇编的可维护性指数，技术债务比和可维护性模型。我们的研究涵盖了整个18年的开发历史，并为三个复杂的开源应用程序发布了所有版本。我们使用建议的模型确定每个版本的可维护性，我们比较获得的结果，并使用手动源代码检查将其置于上下文中。我们检查了目标应用的共同发展模式，并研究了重构与可维护性之间的关系。最后，我们使用手动源代码检查作为基准来研究每个可维护性模型的优势和劣势。
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.
