Measuring Maintainability of Open Source Software Using Metrics

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to study the relationship between maintainability and metrics like lines of code, cyclomatic complexity and halstead volume of fifteen different versions of Java open source software. The result illustrate that these metrics are strongly related to the maintainability of open source software. This report summaries the theory about maintainability of open source software and the impact of these metrics on its maintainability. Open Source Software used for study in this thesis is JFreeChart. It is an open source library available for Java that allows users to easily generate graphs and charts. It is efficient software when a user wants to regenerate graphs that change on a regular basis. JHawk tool is used for calculating values of metrics used for studying the maintainability of JFreeChart, open source software. It is a Java based open source framework which can be included in any java application. The main objective of this thesis is to calculate different metrics like Lines of Code, Cyclomatic Complexity, Halstead Volume and Maintainability Index. The study also includes the comparison of these metrics plotted over various versions of open sourcesoftware JFreeChart.