Challenges in Software Evolution : the Libre Software Perspective ∗

Libre (free, open source) software is providing huge quantities of data suitable to be used in studies of software evolution. Many different aspects of its development process can be studied from data available in public repositories, ranging from the source code in release archives to mailing lists, bug report systems and version control systems. There are already several software evolution studies using that information, leading to a better understanding of libre software projects. However, those projects also pose some new challenges which have to be addressed in the near future, and which could in some cases be also relevant for proprietary software environments. In the software evolution field some of those challenges are: the manipulation and analysis of the high quantity of data available for thousands of projects, which requires new methods and tools; the jump from studying sources of information in isolation (which is currently the state of the art) to the integration of data from various sources; and the importance of considering characteristics of developers as a parameter of software evolution.

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