The purpose of this research was to create measures and models for the
evaluation of Open Source Software (OSS) projects. An exploratory analysis of the
development and maintenance processes in OSS was conducted for this purpose. Data
mining and text mining techniques were used to discover knowledge from transactional
datasets maintained on OSS projects. Large and comprehensive datasets were used to
formulate, test and validate the models.
A new multidimensional measure of OSS project performance, called project viability
was defined and validated. A theoretical and empirical measurement framework was used to
evaluate the new measure. OSS project data from SourceForge.net was used to validate the
new measure. Results indicated that project viability is a measure of the performance of OSS
projects.
Three models were then created for each dimension of project viability. Multiple data
mining techniques were used to create the models. Variables identified from process, product, resource and end-user characteristics of the project were used. The use of new
variables created through text mining improved the performance of the models.
The first model was created for OSS projects in the development phase. The results
indicated that end-user involvement could play a significant role in the development of OSS
projects. It was also discovered that certain types of projects are more suitable for
development in OSS communities. The second model was developed for OSS projects in
their maintenance phase. A two-stage model for maintenance performance was selected. The
results indicated that high project usage and usefulness could improve the maintenance
performance of OSS projects. The third model was developed to investigate the affects of
maintenance activities on the project internal structure. Maintenance data for Linux project
was used to develop a new taxonomy for OSS maintenance patches. These results were then
used to study the affects of various types of patches on the internal structure of the software.
It was found that performing proactive maintenance on the software moderates its internal
structure.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1803 |
| Date | 02 June 2009 |
| Creators | Raja, Uzma |
| Contributors | Tretter, Marietta J. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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