A Study of the Relationships between Source Code Metrics and Attractiveness in Free Software Projects

2010 Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering Pub Date : 2010-09-27 DOI:10.1109/SBES.2010.27

Paulo Meirelles, Carlos Denner dos Santos, João Miranda, Fabio Kon, A. Terceiro, C. Chavez

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引用次数: 70

Abstract

A significant number of Free Software projects has been widely used and considered successful. However, there is an even larger number of them that cannot overcome the initial step towards building an active community of users and developers. In this study, we investigated whether there are relationships between source code metrics and attractiveness, i.e., the ability of a project to attract users and developers. To verify these relationships, we analyzed 6,773 Free Software projects from the SourceForge.net repository. The results indicated that attractiveness is indeed correlated to some source code metrics. This suggests that measurable attributes of the project source code somehow affect the decision to contribute and adopt a Free Software project. The findings described in this study show that it is relevant for project leaders to monitor source code quality, most specifically a few objective metrics, since these can have a positive influence in their chances of forming a community of contributors and users around the software, enabling further enhancement in its quality.

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自由软件项目中源代码度量与吸引力关系的研究

大量的自由软件项目已经被广泛使用并被认为是成功的。然而，有更多的人无法克服建立一个活跃的用户和开发人员社区的第一步。在这项研究中，我们调查了源代码度量和吸引力之间是否存在关系，即项目吸引用户和开发人员的能力。为了验证这些关系，我们分析了来自SourceForge.net存储库的6773个自由软件项目。结果表明，吸引力确实与一些源代码度量相关。这表明项目源代码的可度量属性在某种程度上影响了贡献和采用自由软件项目的决定。本研究中描述的结果表明，项目领导者监控源代码质量是相关的，特别是一些客观的度量标准，因为这些可以对他们围绕软件形成贡献者和用户社区的机会产生积极的影响，从而进一步提高其质量。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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2010 Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering

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