A case study on the transformation from proprietary to open source software
Author
Summary, in English
Many large companies, from the traditionally proprietary software industry, are opening up and embracing the open source software (OSS) development process model as a part of their business strategy.
Despite the recognized potential the OSS community offers, there are still many questions and unknowns about the transition process.
We present an extensive analysis of static software quality metrics changes for Ingres, an open source enterprise database management system (DBMS), as the software was moved from the proprietary into open source software development environment.
The software quality metrics of special interest for the research are cyclomatic complexity, effective lines of code, the degree of system modularity, and the amount of comments in the code. The conducted research shows an overall improvement in the software quality metrics and significant increase of the source code base. The overall improvement is comprised of a decrease in software quality metrics for source files that were changed between the proprietary and the OSS version and an increase in software quality metrics for the source files added through Ingres OSS community development process.
Despite the recognized potential the OSS community offers, there are still many questions and unknowns about the transition process.
We present an extensive analysis of static software quality metrics changes for Ingres, an open source enterprise database management system (DBMS), as the software was moved from the proprietary into open source software development environment.
The software quality metrics of special interest for the research are cyclomatic complexity, effective lines of code, the degree of system modularity, and the amount of comments in the code. The conducted research shows an overall improvement in the software quality metrics and significant increase of the source code base. The overall improvement is comprised of a decrease in software quality metrics for source files that were changed between the proprietary and the OSS version and an increase in software quality metrics for the source files added through Ingres OSS community development process.
Department/s
Publishing year
2010
Language
English
Pages
367-372
Publication/Series
Open Source Software: New Horizons / IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology
Volume
319
Document type
Conference paper
Publisher
Springer
Topic
- Computer Science
Keywords
- proprietary
- software quality
- open source
Conference name
6th International IFIP WG 2.13 Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2010
Conference date
2010-05-31 - 2010-06-02
Conference place
Notre Dame, IN, United States
Status
Published
Project
- Embedded Applications Software Engineering
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISBN: 978-3-642-13243-8