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- Title
An Empirical Study on the Relationship among Software Design Quality, Development Effort, and Governance in Open Source Projects.
- Authors
Capra, Eugenio; Francalanci, Chiara; Merlo, Francesco
- Abstract
The relationship among software design quality, development effort, and governance practices is a traditional research problem. However, the extent to which consolidated results on this relationship remain valid for open source (OS) projects is still an open research problem. An emerging body of literature contrasts the view of OS as an alternative to proprietary software and explains that there exists a continuum between closed and OS projects. This paper takes this perspective and hypothesizes that, as projects approach the OS end of the continuum, governance becomes less formal. In turn, a less formal governance is hypothesized to require a higher quality code as a means to facilitate coordination among developers by making the structure of code explicit and observable and, at the same time, facilitate quality by removing the pressure of deadlines from contributors. However, a less formal governance is also hypothesized to increase development effort due to a more cumbersome coordination Overhead. The verification of research hypotheses is based on empirical data from a sample of 75 major OS projects. Empirical evidence supports our hypotheses and suggests that software design quality, mainly measured as coupling and inheritance, per se does not increase development effort, but represents an important managerial variable to implement the more open governance approach that characterizes OS projects, which, in turn, increases development effort.
- Subjects
EMPIRICAL research; COMPUTER software development; SOFTWARE engineering; COMPUTER software quality control; OPEN source software; COST
- Publication
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2008, Vol 34, Issue 6, p765
- ISSN
0098-5589
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1109/TSE.2008.68