research-article

Evolution of features and their dependencies - an explorative study in OSS

Authors:

Maximilian Steff,

Barbara Russo,

Guenther RuheAuthors Info & Claims

ESEM '12: Proceedings of the ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement

Pages 111 - 114

https://doi.org/10.1145/2372251.2372270

Published: 19 September 2012 Publication History

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Abstract

Release Planning is the process of decision making about what features are to be implemented (or revised) in which release of a software product. While release planning for proprietary software products is well-studied, little investigation has been performed for open source products. Various types of feature dependencies are known to impact both the planning and the subsequent maintenance process. In this paper, we provide the basic layout of a method to formulate and analyze feature dependencies defined at the code level. Dependencies are defined from evolutionary analysis of the commit graph of OSS code development and syntactical dependencies. We demonstrate our method with an explorative study of an open source project, the Spring Framework. From the analysis of the development cycles of two major releases over forty-one months, we could correlate late, increased feature dependencies with an increased number for subsequent improvements and bug fixes.

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Cited By

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Michlmayr MFitzgerald BStol K(2015)Why and How Should Open Source Projects Adopt Time-Based Releases?IEEE Software10.1109/MS.2015.5532:2(55-63)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MS.2015.55
Steff MRusso B(2013)Commit graphs2013 1st International Workshop on Data Analysis Patterns in Software Engineering (DAPSE)10.1109/DAPSE.2013.6603798(4-5)Online publication date: May-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/DAPSE.2013.6603798

Index Terms

Evolution of features and their dependencies - an explorative study in OSS
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
      2. Software management
        Software maintenance

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Published In

ESEM '12: Proceedings of the ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement

September 2012

338 pages

ISBN:9781450310567

DOI:10.1145/2372251

General Chair:
Per Runeson
Lund University, Sweden
,
Program Chairs:
Martin Höst
Lund University, Sweden
,
Emilia Mendes
Zayed University, United Arab Emirates
,
Anneliese Andrews
University of Denver, USA
,
Rachel Harrison
Oxford Brookes University, UK

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 19 September 2012

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ESEM '12: 2012 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

September 19 - 20, 2012

Lund, Sweden

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Cited By

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Michlmayr MFitzgerald BStol K(2015)Why and How Should Open Source Projects Adopt Time-Based Releases?IEEE Software10.1109/MS.2015.5532:2(55-63)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MS.2015.55
Steff MRusso B(2013)Commit graphs2013 1st International Workshop on Data Analysis Patterns in Software Engineering (DAPSE)10.1109/DAPSE.2013.6603798(4-5)Online publication date: May-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/DAPSE.2013.6603798

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Bi-objective release planning for evolving software systems