Applicability of Software Reliability Growth Models to Open Source Software

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Authors

MIČKO Radoslav CHREN Stanislav ROSSI Bruno

Year of publication 2022
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference 48th Euromicro Conference Series on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA2022)
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Informatics

Citation
web https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10011522
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/SEAA56994.2022.00047
Keywords Software Reliability Growth Models; Open Source Software; Cumulative Software Failure Data; Mining Software Repositories
Description Software reliability growth models (SRGMs) are based on underlying assumptions which make them typically more suited for quality evaluation of closed-source projects and their development lifecycles. Their usage in open-source software (OSS) projects is a subject of debate. Although the studies investigating the SRGMs applicability in OSS context do exist, they are limited by the number of models and projects considered which might lead to inconclusive results. In this paper, we present an experimental study of SRGMs applicability to a total of 88 OSS projects, comparing nine SRGMs, looking at the stability of the best models on the whole projects, on releases, on different domains and according to different projects attributes. With the aid of the STRAIT tool, we automated repository mining, data processing and SRGM analysis for reproducibility. Overall, we found good applicability of SRGMs to OSS, but with different performance when segmenting the dataset into releases, domains and considering projects attributes, suggesting that the search for one-fits-all models is unrealistic, rather recommending to look for the characteristics of projects and bug fixing processes for the prediction of applicable models.
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