Improving Open Source Software Maintenance
Vishal Midha, Rahul Kumar Singh, Prashant Palvia, Nir Kshetri · Journal of Computer Information Systems · 2013
Maintenance is inevitable for almost any software. Software maintenance is required to fix bugs, to add new features, to improve performance, and/or to adapt to a changed environment. In this article, we examine change in cognitive complexity and its impacts on maintenance in the context of open source software (OSS). Relationships of the change in cognitive complexity with the change in the number of reported bugs, time taken to fix the bugs, and contributions from new developers are examined and are all found to be statistically significant. In addition, several control variables, such as software size, age, development status, and programmer skills are included in the analyses. The results have strong implications for OSS project administrators; they must continually measure software complexity and be actively involved in managing it in order to have successful and sustainable OSS products.