Duration Estimation Models for Open Source Software Projects

Abstract

For software organizations that rely on Open Source Software (OSS) to develop customer solutions and products, it is essential to accurately estimate how long it will take to deliver the expected functionalities. While OSS is supported by government policies around the world, most of the research on software project estimation has focused on conventional projects with commercial licenses. OSS effort estimation is challenging since OSS participants do not record effort data in OSS repositories. However, OSS data repositories contain dates of the participants’ contributions and these can be used for duration estimation. This study analyses historical data on WordPress and Swift projects to estimate OSS project duration using either commits or lines of code (LOC) as the independent variable. This study proposes first an improved classification of contributors based on the number of active days for each contributor in the development period of a release. For the WordPress and Swift OSS projects environments the results indicate that duration estimation models using the number of commits as the independent variable perform better than those using LOC. The estimation model for full-time contributors gives an estimate of the total duration, while the models with part-time and occasional contributors lead to better estimates of projects duration with both for the commits data and the lines of data.