Free Open Source Communities Sustainability: Does It Make a Difference in Software Quality?

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06916v1
• Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2024 09:37:44 GMT
• Title: Free Open Source Communities Sustainability: Does It Make a Difference in Software Quality?
• Authors: Adam Alami, Ra\'ul Pardo and Johan Lin\r{a}ker
• Abstract summary: This study aims to empirically explore how the different aspects of sustainability impact software quality. 16 sustainability metrics across four categories were sampled and applied to a set of 217 OSS projects.
• Score: 2.981092370528753
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Context: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities' ability to stay viable and productive over time is pivotal for society as they maintain the building blocks that digital infrastructure, products, and services depend on. Sustainability may, however, be characterized from multiple aspects, and less is known how these aspects interplay and impact community outputs, and software quality specifically. Objective: This study, therefore, aims to empirically explore how the different aspects of FOSS sustainability impact software quality. Method: 16 sustainability metrics across four categories were sampled and applied to a set of 217 OSS projects sourced from the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program. The impact of a decline in the sustainability metrics was analyzed against eight software quality metrics using Bayesian data analysis, which incorporates probability distributions to represent the regression coefficients and intercepts. Results: Findings suggest that selected sustainability metrics do not significantly affect defect density or code coverage. However, a positive impact of community age was observed on specific code quality metrics, such as risk complexity, number of very large files, and code duplication percentage. Interestingly, findings show that even when communities are experiencing sustainability, certain code quality metrics are negatively impacted. Conclusion: Findings imply that code quality practices are not consistently linked to sustainability, and defect management and prevention may be prioritized over the former. Results suggest that growth, resulting in a more complex and large codebase, combined with a probable lack of understanding of code quality standards, may explain the degradation in certain aspects of code quality.

Related papers

• Understanding Code Understandability Improvements in Code Reviews [79.16476505761582]
  We analyzed 2,401 code review comments from Java open-source projects on GitHub. 83.9% of suggestions for improvement were accepted and integrated, with fewer than 1% later reverted.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-29T12:21:23Z)
• The Impact of SBOM Generators on Vulnerability Assessment in Python: A Comparison and a Novel Approach [56.4040698609393]
  Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) has been promoted as a tool to increase transparency and verifiability in software composition. Current SBOM generation tools often suffer from inaccuracies in identifying components and dependencies. We propose PIP-sbom, a novel pip-inspired solution that addresses their shortcomings.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-09-10T10:12:37Z)
• Towards Understanding the Impact of Code Modifications on Software Quality Metrics [1.2277343096128712]
  This study aims to assess and interpret the impact of code modifications on software quality metrics. The underlying hypothesis posits that code modifications inducing similar changes in software quality metrics can be grouped into distinct clusters. The results reveal distinct clusters of code modifications, each accompanied by a concise description, revealing their collective impact on software quality metrics.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-04-05T08:41:18Z)
• Do Internal Software Metrics Have Relationship with Fault-proneness and Change-proneness? [1.9526430269580959]
  We identified 25 internal software metrics along with the measures of change-proneness and fault-proneness within the Apache and Eclipse ecosystems. Most of the metrics have little to no correlation with fault-proneness. metrics related to inheritance, coupling, and comments showed a moderate to high correlation with change-proneness.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-09-23T07:19:41Z)
• Individual context-free online community health indicators fail to identify open source software sustainability [3.192308005611312]
  We monitored thirty-eight open source projects over the period of a year. None of the projects were abandoned during this period, and only one project entered a planned shutdown. Results were highly heterogeneous, showing little commonality across documentation, mean response times for issues and code contributions, and available funding/staffing resources.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-09-21T14:41:41Z)
• Software Code Quality Measurement: Implications from Metric Distributions [6.110201315596897]
  We categorized distinct metrics into two types: 1) monotonic metrics that consistently influence code quality; and 2) non-monotonic metrics that lack a consistent relationship with code quality. Our work contributes to the multi-dimensional construct of code quality and its metric measurements, which provides practical implications for consistent measurements on both monotonic and non-monotonic metrics.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-07-22T13:55:42Z)
• BayesIMP: Uncertainty Quantification for Causal Data Fusion [52.184885680729224]
  We study the causal data fusion problem, where datasets pertaining to multiple causal graphs are combined to estimate the average treatment effect of a target variable. We introduce a framework which combines ideas from probabilistic integration and kernel mean embeddings to represent interventional distributions in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-06-07T10:14:18Z)
• The Mind Is a Powerful Place: How Showing Code Comprehensibility Metrics Influences Code Understanding [10.644832702859484]
  We investigate whether a displayed metric value for source code comprehensibility anchors developers in their subjective rating of source code comprehensibility. We found that the displayed value of a comprehensibility metric has a significant and large anchoring effect on a developer's code comprehensibility rating.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-12-16T14:27:45Z)
• Accurate and Robust Feature Importance Estimation under Distribution Shifts [49.58991359544005]
  PRoFILE is a novel feature importance estimation method. We show significant improvements over state-of-the-art approaches, both in terms of fidelity and robustness.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-09-30T05:29:01Z)
• An Uncertainty-based Human-in-the-loop System for Industrial Tool Wear Analysis [68.8204255655161]
  We show that uncertainty measures based on Monte-Carlo dropout in the context of a human-in-the-loop system increase the system's transparency and performance. A simulation study demonstrates that the uncertainty-based human-in-the-loop system increases performance for different levels of human involvement.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-07-14T15:47:37Z)
• On the Relation between Quality-Diversity Evaluation and Distribution-Fitting Goal in Text Generation [86.11292297348622]
  We show that a linear combination of quality and diversity constitutes a divergence metric between the generated distribution and the real distribution. We propose CR/NRR as a substitute for quality/diversity metric pair.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-07-03T04:06:59Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.