The Impact of Functional Complexity on Open Source Maintenance Costs: An Exploratory Empirical Analysis
Eugenio Capra, Francesco Merlo · 2008
It is well known that software complexity affects the maintenance costs of proprietary software. In the Open Source (OS) context, the sharing of development and maintenance effort among developers is a fundamental tenet, which can be thought as a driver to reduce the impact of complexity on maintenance costs. However, complexity is a structural property of code, which is not quantitatively accounted for in traditional cost models. We introduce the concept of functional complexity, which weights the well-established cyclomatic complexity metric to the number of interactive functional elements that an application provides to users. The goal of this paper is to analyze how Open Source maintenance costs are affected by functional complexity: we posit that costs are influenced by higher levels of functional complexity, and traditional cost models, like CoCoMo, do not properly take into account the impact of functional complexity on maintenance costs. Analyses are based on quality, complexity and cost data collected for 906 OS application versions. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.