Paper Info
Title
Quality Factors and Coding Standards -- a Comparison Between Open Source Forges
Abstract
Enforcing adherence to standards in software development in order to produce high quality software artefacts has long been recognised as best practice in traditional software engineering. In a distributed heterogeneous development environment such those found within the Open Source paradigm, coding standards are informally shared and adhered to by communities of loosely coupled developers. Following these standards could potentially lead to higher quality software. This paper reports on the empirical analysis of two major forges where OSS projects are hosted. The first one, the KDE forge, provides a set of guidelines and coding standards in the form of a coding style that developers may conform to when producing the code source artefacts. The second studied forge, SourceForge, imposes no formal coding standards on developers. A sample of projects from these two forges has been analysed to detect whether the SourceForge sample, where no coding standards are reinforced, has a lower quality than the sample from KDE. Results from this analysis form a complex picture; visually, all the selected metrics show a clear divide between the two forges, but from the statistical standpoint, clear distinctions cannot be drawn amongst these quality related measures in the two forge samples.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1016/j.entcs.2009.02.063
Electr. Notes Theor. Comput. Sci.
Keywords
Field
DocType
coding standards,software development,sourceforge sample,formal coding standard,open source software,coding standard,open source forges,coding style,complexity,higher quality software,major forge,lower quality,quality factors,high quality software artefact,traditional software engineering,software engineering,quality factor,best practice,development environment
Data science,World Wide Web,Best coding practices,Best practice,Computer science,Development environment,Theoretical computer science,Coding (social sciences),Software,Software construction,Software quality,Software development
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
233,
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
17
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andrea Capiluppi148842.51
Cornelia Boldyreff246456.05
Karl Beecher3583.52
Paul J. Adams4633.74