An empirical comparison of the development history of cloudstack and eucalyptus

Abstract

Open source cloud computing solutions, such as CloudStack and Eucalyptus, have become increasingly popular in recent years. Despite this popularity, a better understanding of the factors influencing user adoption is still under active research. For example, increased project agility may lead to solutions that remain competitive in a rapidly evolving market, while keeping the software quality under control. Like any software system that is subject to frequent evolution, cloud computing solutions are subject to errors and quality problems, which may affect user experience and require frequent bug fixes. While prior comparisons of cloud platforms have focused most often on their provided services and functionalities, the current paper provides an empirical comparison of CloudStack and Eucalyptus, focusing on quality-related software development aspects. More specifically, we study the change history of the source code and its unit tests, as well as the history of bugs in the Jira issue tracker. We found that CloudStack has a high and more rapidly increasing test coverage than Eucalyptus. CloudStack contributors are more likely to participate in development and testing. We also observed differences between both projects pertaining to the bug life cycle and bug fixing time.