Evolution of understanding in OSS projects
Andrea Capiluppi, Maurizio Morisio, Patricia Lago · University of Groningen research database (University of Groningen / Centre for Information Technology) · 2004
Empirical papers on Open Source software should tryand formulate reasons for successes as Linux, Apacheand some other flagship projects.What we need to understand about this topic is on the process ofproducing software through cooperation of differentefforts.Albeit many success reasons for these projectsare inherently due to the application domain that theproject develops, architectural and conceptual views ofthe code have to be considered as key factors whenconsidering community efforts and joint decisions.In this work we focus our attention on what isperceived of a source code when investigating itsstructure.We do this considering that structure as aproxy for the conceptual architecture of theapplication.A metric is developed based on somecurrent assumptions, and it is test over a sample ofOpen Source projects.What is interesting to note, isthat refactoring efforts are clearly visible whenintended as reduction of complexity of source code.Our second observation is that, based on what an OpenSource software currently does, i.e. its applicationdomain, there's a threshold value that several projectstend to.