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The impact of developer team sizes on the structural attributes of software

Published: 30 August 2015 Publication History

Abstract

It is established that the internal quality of software is a key determinant of the total cost of ownership of that software. The objective of this research is to determine the impact that the development team’s size has on the internal structural attributes of a codebase and, in doing so, we consider the impact that the team’s size may have on the internal quality of the software that they produce. In this paper we leverage the wealth of data available in the open-source domain by mining detailed data from 1000 projects in GoogleCode and, coupled with one of the most established of object-oriented metric suites, we isolate and identify the effect that the development team size has on internal structural attributes of the software produced. We will find that some measures of functional decomposition are enhanced when we compare projects authored by fewer developers against those authored by a larger number of developers while measures of cohesion and complexity are degraded.

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  • (2023)An empirical investigation of social comparison and open source community healthInformation Systems Journal10.1111/isj.1248534:2(499-532)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
  • (2023)PENTACET data - 23 Million Contextual Code Comments and 250,000 SATD comments2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00063(412-416)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2021)Open Source Community Health: Analytical Metrics and Their Corresponding Narratives2021 IEEE/ACM 4th International Workshop on Software Health in Projects, Ecosystems and Communities (SoHeal)10.1109/SoHeal52568.2021.00010(25-33)Online publication date: May-2021

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  1. The impact of developer team sizes on the structural attributes of software

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IWPSE 2015: Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution
    August 2015
    78 pages
    ISBN:9781450338165
    DOI:10.1145/2804360
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 30 August 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. Complexity Metrics
    2. Mining Software Repositories
    3. Open Source Software Development Process

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    View all
    • (2023)An empirical investigation of social comparison and open source community healthInformation Systems Journal10.1111/isj.1248534:2(499-532)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
    • (2023)PENTACET data - 23 Million Contextual Code Comments and 250,000 SATD comments2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00063(412-416)Online publication date: May-2023
    • (2021)Open Source Community Health: Analytical Metrics and Their Corresponding Narratives2021 IEEE/ACM 4th International Workshop on Software Health in Projects, Ecosystems and Communities (SoHeal)10.1109/SoHeal52568.2021.00010(25-33)Online publication date: May-2021

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