Evaluating Maintainability Prejudices with a Large-Scale Study of Open-Source Projects

Exaggeration or context changes can render maintainability experience into prejudice. For example, JavaScript is often seen as least elegant language and hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions without prior empirical validation. We formulated 10 hypotheses about maintainability based on prejudices and test them in a large set of open-source projects (6,897 GitHub repositories, 402 million lines, 5 programming languages). We operationalize maintainability with five static analysis metrics. We found that JavaScript code is not worse than other code, Java code shows higher maintainability than C# code and C code has longer methods than other code. The quality of interface documentation is better in Java code than in other code. Code developed by teams is not of higher and large code bases not of lower maintainability. Projects with high maintainability are not more popular or more often forked. Overall, most hypotheses are not supported by open-source data.Comment: 20 page

Software Product and Process Assessment Through Profile-Based Evaluation

Software entities (software products or processes) are characterized by many attributes, each one in its turn can be measured by one or more measures. In several cases the software entities have to be evaluated as a whole, thus raising the problem of aggregating measures to give an overall, single view on the software entity. This paper presents a method to aggregate measures, which works by comparing the product/process with predefined, ideal entities, or profiles. Profiles are defined starting from ranges of values on measures of attributes. The method is based on two main phases, namely definition of the evaluation model and application of the evaluation model. It is presented through a simplified case study that deals with evaluating the level of quality of an asset to decide whether to accept it in a reuse repository. A plausible way of how the method could be applied to process maturity assessment is also provided. The advantages of the method are that it allows using ordinal scales, while it deals explicitly with preferences expressed, implicitly or explicitly, by the evaluator.ou

A New Method to Evaluate Software Artifacts against Predefined Profiles

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