Empirical study of the open source software evolution using JUnit

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) is software products available to the public use, with its source code to study, change, and improves its quality. Open Source Software Development (OSSD) is the process by which open source software is developed within the process of software engineering life-cycle methods. However when open source software used for commercial purpose, then an open source license is required. Open source software is mostly developed in a public and collaborative manner. Open source software development movement has been getting focus on both the area of development and academics. Despite the fact that the open source software developments have seen remarkable successful in recent years, there are a number of product quality issues and challenges facing the open source software development model. The data of Open Source Software (OSS) in the repositories is available for most large software projects and represents a detailed and rich record of the historical development of software systems. Until recently these repositories were used primarily for their intended activities such as maintaining versions of the source code or tracking the status of a defect. Software practitioners and researchers are beginning to recognize the potential benefit of mining this information for other purposes. This study thus has been conducted focusing on the evolution of the open source software. The idea in this thesis is to study the evolution of the open source software under the effects of the data mined from the version control system. The laws of software evolution and their development as the basis for a theory of software evolution represents a major intellectual contribution and challenge to the software engineering research community, and to the broader community of computer science. In this thesis an open source unit testing framework for the Java programming language is studied on its different parameters. The approach of this thesis is study of software evolution in open source software environment by using different software resources to support Lehman's law.