A quantitative analysis of open source software's acceptability as production-quality code
Calvin Lathan, Michael D. Fischer · ProQuest LLC eBooks · 2011
The difficulty in writing defect-free software has been long acknowledged both by academia and industry. A constant battle occurs as developers seek to craft software that works within aggressive business schedules and deadlines. Many tools and techniques are used in attempt to manage these software projects. Software metrics are a tool that has seen limited application within industry despite detailed analysis by academia. When adopted by a development team, software metrics have the ability to provide insight into the quality of a software product and to provide warning indicators during the development phase, when changes can be more readily made. Current research on software metrics has focused on Java, C++, and Smalltalk while neglecting Microsoft .Net based languages. The Microsoft .Net Framework is responsible for a growing portion of the source code that exists within corporate environments. The tool support for .Net lags behind other platforms. Microsoft Visual Studio contains support for metric analysis but only in its higher-end editions. This study utilizes a commercially available software package to begin building a foundation for study and analysis of projects using the Microsoft .Net C# language. NDepend was used to analyze 185 samples from two separate software repositories to determine that the quality of open source software projects written using C# met established software quality metrics.