Entropy based Software Reliability Growth Modelling for Open Source Software Evolution

Abstract

During Open Source Software (OSS) development, users submit "new features (NFs)", "feature improvements (IMPs)" and bugs to fix. A proportion of these issues get fixed before the next software release. During the introduction of NFs and IMPs, the source code files change. A proportion of these source code changes may result in generation of bugs. We have developed calendar time and entropy-dependent mathematical models to represent the growth of OSS based on the rate at which NFs are added, IMPs are added, and bugs introduction rate.The empirical validation has been conducted on five products, namely "Avro, Pig, Hive, jUDDI and Whirr" of the Apache open source project. We compared the proposed models with eminent reliability growth models, Goel and Okumoto (1979) and Yamada et al. (1983) and found that the proposed models exhibit better goodness of fit.

Keywords

• entropy
• feature improvement
• new feature
• open source software