Statistical properties of file modification in open-source software repositories:case studies
Sihai Lin · Computer Engineering and Applications Journal · 2013
Open and collaborative development of open-source software may change the traditional mode for software development.Mining the evolutionary rules of source code files in a SVN(Subversion)repository is conducive to detecting potential bugs and then to improving the quality of software.This paper conducts empirical experiments on two object-oriented open-source software systems,and finds that the number of changes for class files follows roughly a power-law distribution,the modification difference between a pair of adjacent versions of frequently-changed classes also follows approximately a power-law distribution,and there are significantly positive correlations between the number of changes and both source lines of code and the number of imported classes,implying that the function and structure of these classes tend to become more complex.The findings of these 2 case studies provide new insights into the research on evolution,refactoring,and task allocation of maintenance for opensource software.