In software engineering, relying on experience can render maintainability expertise into prejudice over time. For example, based on their own experience, some consider JavaScript as inelegant language and hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions without prior empirical validation.
Static analysis has been used by other researchers to investigate the quality of open-source code. But most of that research considers few software applications or few programming languages. @cite_15 and @cite_22 present studies on code quality of open-source code. @cite_31 present a study on open-source code, investigating the impact of team size on code quality. All three papers also use static analysis to measure code quality, they use different metrics, which we consider less suitable for maintainability. Furthermore, they do not investigate the impact of programming language or other factors on quality. Ahmed, Ghorashi and Jensen @cite_32 investigate the code quality of open-source code by examining the correlation between code smells and project characteristics. They do not investigate the impact of programming language and use different static analysis metrics.
@cite_15 @cite_32 @cite_31 @cite_22
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A study of almost six million lines of code tracks how freely accessible source code holds up against time and multiple iterations. It is a widely held belief that Free Open Source Software (FOSS) development leads to the creation of software with the same, if not higher quality compared to that created using proprietary software development models. However there is little research on evaluating the quality of FOSS code, and the impact of project characteristics such as age, number of core developers, code-base size, etc. In this exploratory study, we examined 110 FOSS projects, measuring the quality of the code and architectural design using code smells. We found that, contrary to our expectations, the overall quality of the code is not affected by the size of the code base, but that it was negatively impacted by the growth of the number of code contributors. Our results also show that projects with more core developers don’t necessarily have better code quality. Eleven open source software projects were analyzed to determine if the number of committing developers impacts code quality. We use cyclomatic complexity, lines of code per function, comment density, and maximum nesting as surrogate measures of code quality. We find no significant evidence to suggest that the number of committing developers affects the quality of software. Proponents of open source style software development claim that better software is produced using this model compared with the traditional closed model. However, there is little empirical evidence in support of these claims. In this paper, we present the results of a pilot case study aiming: (a) to understand the implications of structural quality; and (b) to figure out the benefits of struc- tural quality analysis of the code delivered by open source style development. To this end, we have measured quality characteristics of 100 applications written for Linux, using a software measurement tool, and compared the results with the industrial standard that is proposed by the tool. Another target of this case study was to investigate the issue of modularity in open source as this characteristic is being considered crucial by the proponents of open source for this type of soft- ware development. We have empirically assessed the relationship between the size of the application components and the delivered quality measured through user satisfaction. We have determined that, up to a certain extent, the average component size of an application is negatively related to the user satisfaction for this application.