Applying machine learning techniques to predict the maintainability of open source software

Abstract

Software maintainability is a vital quality aspect as per ISO standards. This has been a concern since decades and even today, it is of top priority. At present, majority of the software applications, particularly open source software are being developed using Object-Oriented methodologies. Researchers in the earlier past have used statistical techniques on metric data extracted from software to evaluate maintainability. Recently, machine learning models and algorithms are also being used in a majority of research works to predict maintainability. In this research, we performed an empirical case study on an open source software jfreechart by applying machine learning algorithms. The objective was to study the relationships between certain metrics and maintainability.