An exploratory empirical study of internal quality attributes of open source software systems

Abstract

This exploratory empirical study has focused on open source software (OSS). Seven medium-sized OSS systems from the SourceForge repository were analysed. Over 100 internal quality attributes and programming practices were scrutinized by using two semi-automated source code analysis tools (FindBugs and SoftCalc). Many statistically significant relations were revealed by the conducted regression analyses. Seven so-called bad programming practices; as manifested by the measured source code inconsistencies were identified as having significant relations to internal software quality. Additionally we set and tested two hypotheses. That investigation provided mixed results partly supporting some of the earlier findings between software size and potential maintenance problems; especially related to some of the programming practices. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media.