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Determinism and evolution

Authors:

Israel Herraiz,

Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona,

Gregorio RoblesAuthors Info & Claims

MSR '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories

Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/1370750.1370752

Published: 10 May 2008 Publication History

Abstract

It has been proposed that software evolution follows a Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) dynamics. This fact is supported by the presence of long range correlations in the time series of the number of changes made to the source code over time. Those long range correlations imply that the current state of the project was determined time ago. In other words, the evolution of the software project is governed by a sort of determinism. But this idea seems to contradict intuition. To explore this apparent contradiction, we have performed an empirical study on a sample of 3, 821 libre (free, open source) software projects, finding that their evolution projects is short range correlated. This suggests that the dynamics of software evolution may not be SOC, and therefore that the past of a project does not determine its future except for relatively short periods of time, at least for libre software.

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Cited By

Arshad MRiaz AFatima RYasin A(2024)SevPredict: Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models in Software MaintenanceAI10.3390/ai50401325:4(2739-2760)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/ai5040132
Saini MChahal K(2022)A Systematic Review of Attributes and Techniques for Open Source Software Evolution AnalysisResearch Anthology on Agile Software, Software Development, and Testing10.4018/978-1-6684-3702-5.ch006(84-106)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-3702-5.ch006
Saini MChahal K(2021)A Systematic Review of Attributes and Techniques for Open Source Software Evolution AnalysisResearch Anthology on Usage and Development of Open Source Software10.4018/978-1-7998-9158-1.ch001(1-23)Online publication date: 2021
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-9158-1.ch001
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Determinism and evolution
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software version control
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

MSR '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories

May 2008

162 pages

ISBN:9781605580241

DOI:10.1145/1370750

General Chair:
Ahmed E. Hassan
Queen's University, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Michele Lanza
University of Lugano, Switzerland
,
Michael W. Godfrey
University of Waterloo, Canada

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 May 2008

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ICSE '08: International Conference on Software Engineering

May 10 - 11, 2008

Leipzig, Germany

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Cited By

Arshad MRiaz AFatima RYasin A(2024)SevPredict: Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models in Software MaintenanceAI10.3390/ai50401325:4(2739-2760)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/ai5040132
Saini MChahal K(2022)A Systematic Review of Attributes and Techniques for Open Source Software Evolution AnalysisResearch Anthology on Agile Software, Software Development, and Testing10.4018/978-1-6684-3702-5.ch006(84-106)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-3702-5.ch006
Saini MChahal K(2021)A Systematic Review of Attributes and Techniques for Open Source Software Evolution AnalysisResearch Anthology on Usage and Development of Open Source Software10.4018/978-1-7998-9158-1.ch001(1-23)Online publication date: 2021
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-9158-1.ch001
Saini MChahal K(2018)A Systematic Review of Attributes and Techniques for Open Source Software Evolution AnalysisOptimizing Contemporary Application and Processes in Open Source Software10.4018/978-1-5225-5314-4.ch001(1-23)Online publication date: 2018
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-5314-4.ch001
Chahal KSaini M(2016)Open Source Software EvolutionInternational Journal of Open Source Software and Processes10.4018/IJOSSP.20160101017:1(1-27)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/IJOSSP.2016010101
Russo BSteff MCounsell SMarchesi MVisaggio AZhang HVenkatasubramanyam R(2014)What can changes tell about software processes?Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics10.1145/2593868.2593869(1-7)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2593868.2593869
Herraiz IRodriguez DRobles GGonzalez-Barahona J(2013)The evolution of the laws of software evolutionACM Computing Surveys10.1145/2543581.254359546:2(1-28)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2543581.2543595
Neamtiu IXie GChen J(2013)Towards a better understanding of software evolutionJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.56425:3(193-218)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/smr.564
JUNG WLEE EWU C(2012)A Survey on Mining Software RepositoriesIEICE Transactions on Information and Systems10.1587/transinf.E95.D.1384E95.D:5(1384-1406)Online publication date: 2012
https://doi.org/10.1587/transinf.E95.D.1384
Shang WAdams BHassan A(2012)Using Pig as a data preparation language for large-scale mining software repositories studiesJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2011.07.03485:10(2195-2204)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2011.07.034
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