A Study of Maintainability in Evolving Open-Source Software

Our study is focused on an evaluation of the maintainability characteristic in context long-term evolution open-source software. According to well established software quality models such as ISO 9126 and more recent 25010, remains among key characteristics alongside performance, security reliability. To achieve our objective, we selected three complex, widely used target applications for which access their entire development history source code was available. enable cross-application comparison, restricted selection GUI-driven developed Java platform. We examination released versions, resulting 111 releases included case study. These covered than 10 years each applications. For version, determined its using distinct quantitative varying complexity. examined relation between size studied main drivers important changes maintainability. contextualized findings manual examination. also carried out a finer grained at package level determine distribution issues within application code. Finally, provided analysis order identify common application-specific patterns.