Design Metrics on Prediction of Open Source Software Complexity

Abstract: The growth of open source softwares (OSS) is playing a big role in the industry. The important contributions that have been generated over the past years are found to be useful for software developers. The development method used to produce open source software is different in that it participates programmers who are interested in coding. On the other hand, software complexity is one aspect that should be raised during the development of software. It is considered as one factor linked with different characteristics of quality in software. Since there are multiple developers located in different places who commit their codes to repositories, there is a need to understand the complexity of OSS before using them.A systematic use of object oriented design metrics can be useful in helping to solve this. In this paper, the complexity of the most popular open source softwares is investigated by the use of statistical assessment of the metrics. In order to facilitate this, it includes a case study to investigate complexity of ten popular projects that are available sourceforge.The case study has shown that applying software metrics that would measure the different aspects of software would be useful in analyzing, studying and improving the complexity of open source software.