Evaluating Maintainability of Open Source Software: A Case Study

Maintainability is one of the most important quality attribute that affect the quality of software. There are four factors that affect the maintainability of software which are: analyzability, changeability, stability, and testability. Open source software (OSS) developed by collaborative work done by volunteers through around the world with different management styles. Open source code is updated and modified all the time from the first release. Therefore, there is a need to measure the quality and specifically the maintainability of such code. This paper discusses the maintainability for the three domains of the open source software. The domains are: education, business and game. Moreover, to observe the most effective metrics that directly affects the maintainability of software. Analysis of the results demonstrates that OSS in the education domain is the most maintainable code and cl_stat (number of executable statements) metric has the highest degree of influence on the calculation of maintenance in all three domains.