Evaluating the Evolution of Small Scale Open Source Software Systems

For real-world software to remain satisfactory to its stakeholders requires its continual enhancement and adaptation. Acceptance of this phenomenon, termed software evolution, as intrinsic to real world software has led to an increasing interest in disciplined and systematic planning, management and improvement of the evolution process. Almost all of the previous work on software evolution has been concerned with the evolution of large scale real-world software systems developed within a single company using traditional management techniques, or with the large scale open source software systems (LSOSSS). However, there is to our knowledge little or no work that has considered small scale open source software systems (SSOSSS). This paper presents an analysis of the evolution behavior of two small size open source software systems, the Barcode Library and Zlib. Surprisingly, unlike large scale open source software systems, the evolution behavior of these small size open source software systems appears to follow Lehman’s laws for software evolution