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Open Source Code Maintainability Analyzed
gManZboy writes "Four computer scientists have done a formal analysis of five Open Source software projects to determine how being "Open Source" contributes to or inhibits source code maintainability. While they admit further research is needed, they conclude that open source is no magic bullet on this particular issue, and argue that Open Source software development should strive for even greater code maintainability." From the article: "The disadvantages of OSS development include absence of complete documentation or technical support. Moreover, there is strong evidence that projects with clear and widely accepted specifications, such as operating systems and system applications, are well suited for the OSS development model. However, it is still questionable whether systems like ERP could be developed successfully as OSS projects. "
by Ioannis Samoladas, Ioannis Stamelos, Lefteris Angelis, Apostolos Oikonomou ...it was all Greek to me.
As a software engineer, I do like to point out something to you. "At least with open source you CAN maintain it if necessary" is not true! Maintenance takes up a good 60+% of a software cycle. Doing maintenance requires good documentation, fixing a bug is a minor issue, especially when it's easy to track down. Understanding design decisions, understanding architecture so that you can extend the software is a big challenge.
.segmond
Without appropriate documentations, you end up doing what has been done all over again, studying the software to understand how it works, which can be taxing. Go look at somewhat complex OSS projects, try hacking gcc to spit out a different binary format without reading any documentation. Try understanding postgres without documentation. GUI applications like a CAD system are even harder to make sense out of. If you are actually talented enough, the sheer effort you will poor into understanding the system, you might as well spend it designing from the ground up.
Most people are not hackers, If they were, why would they need source code? crackers don't need source code to add functionality to any system, it's a matter of patching the object code, having a section of the code jump to your own code and return. But it's ugly, having source code makes it a little bit prettier but not much.
Documentation is the key!
O.k., perhaps its not a surprise, but in the end the community needs to do away with the 'more eyes make better software' myth in order to move forward. In that sense, it is good that 'professionals' are now pointing out that some of the software out there is actually quite bad and that it is _not_ generally acceptable to not maintain documentation and uphold good project hygiene.
Here's a nice experiment for you:
1. Select a random project, preferably one that's slightly buggy during ordinary use.
2. Subscribe to project's mailing list.
3. Politely inquire if the project has any kind of automated test suite.
4. Observe stumped reaction.
5. Kindly explain the absolute necessity of such a system in any non-trivial app.
6. Go down in flames.
That attitude needs to change.
However, it is still questionable whether systems like ERP could be developed successfully as OSS projects.
I could be mistaken, but isn't Compiere an established OSS ERP implementation?
I think the questin shouldn't be: 'Can software like ERP be developed as OSS?' But rather: 'Are there enough people in the OSS community interested enough to develop this kind of software without any form of financial support?' I think the answer has turned out to be 'no'. The same goes for things like (good) financial software, and anything that would require heaps of work, high precision and coordination, but no spectaculair result for the common man to brag about.
Sort of ... kind of ...
There comes a point where, particularly without design documentation, the bar is raised so high that the effort involved in maintaining something is more than that involved in moving to a new product. There's a scaling problem here. What works with small, simple direct programs doesn't work with large, complex or indirect programs.
And some OSS code is simply completely undocumented, not even a comment -- apart from the licence. Something I discovered wandering through the XFree86 XKB code.
See http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_12/bezroukov/ index.html
for a discussion some of the weaknesses of the open source model when it comes to program comprehension.
You're actually trying to claim that Winamp's design is good?
Winamp and other players which try to emulate the look and feel of a "new wave" stereo do nothing but piss me off. Stereo systems have the bad interfaces they do because of an inherent lack of physical space; something that's still a concern with computers, but much less of one.
Here's to more programs like Rhythmbox and iTunes which have the *important* controls accessible, allow for easy categorisation of songs, and use screen space nicely. All that without having to resort to 6pt fonts.
No comment.
Well, the importance of a test suite rises dramatically with the complexity of the project. The difficulty of making a test suite increases with the amount of hardware that you need to implement it. When I think of "big" open source projects that aren't very hardware dependant - for example, ITK (the Insight Toolkit), they tend to have nice test suites. Naturally, the little ones don't, but little projects of most things don't have test suites.
I agree, though, that automated test suites are underused. Also, not enough programmers (OSS or otherwise) seem to understand the importance of refactoring.
A message to coders: People, if your function is more than 10 lines long, you should start to consider splitting it. If it's more than 100 lines long, you're probably doing something wrong. If you have the same code written with slight modifications two or more different ways, you're probably doing something wrong. Use templates rather than repeating code if your language supports them. If you ever feel "this should probably be commented more", don't comment it - split it up into functions and let the functions be their own comments (if you have to, comment the functions as well). Use const as much as physically possible (in supporting languages). Use array objects that clean themselves up instead of arrays allocated on-the-fly whenever physically possible. If you find certain variables being used often together, group them into an object. If you find a set of functions operating on an object and only that object, make them member functions. Etc.
Just doing basic refactoring can make code far more organized and readable.
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)