SHF: Small: Open Source Software Components: Utilization Assessment and Automatic Retrieval

几十年来，软件质量一直是一个重要但虚幻的概念，专家们的指导方针不同，有时甚至相互冲突。使用一个由大约20,000个开源Java项目组成的生态系统，这项研究将试图发现开源组件利用率和软件质量度量之间的相关性，以便提供迄今为止最有力的经验证据，说明与软件质量有关的几个度量如何与可重用组件的实际利用率相关。这项研究将为现有的一些指导方针提供科学依据，并为废除另一些准则提供科学依据。如果没有发现相关性，这一结果将扰乱当前对组件质量的概念化，迫使研究人员和开发人员重新评估他们对软件质量和可重用组件的理解。软件是现代社会的基础，开源开发是整个社会的一场重大运动，在全球范围内深入了解软件质量至关重要，从而导致创新工具和方法的发展。本研究使用的度量标准由SQO-OSS质量模型定义。为了理解相关性，将使用以下方法。首先将构建依赖关系图，捕获全球范围内的软件依赖关系。这需要克服清理和聚集数据方面的技术挑战，因为现实世界中的项目包含与使用外部组件相关的各种特性。其次，将使用此全局依赖关系图开发一套利用率指标，以捕获这些项目使用组件的深度和广度。最后，将计算数据集中重要项目子集的SQO-OSS质量指标，并将其与项目的利用率指标进行比较，以揭示相关性。

Software quality has been an important but illusive concept for several decades, with experts different, sometimes conflicting, guidelines. Using an ecosystem of about 20,000 open source Java projects, this study will to try to discover correlations between open source component utilization and software quality metrics, in order to provide the strongest empirical evidence yet as to how the several metrics pertaining to software quality correlate with actual utilization of reusable components. This study will provide a scientific basis to some of the existing guidelines and to the dismissal of some others. If no correlations are found, this result will disrupt current conceptualizations of component quality, forcing researchers and developers to reassess their understanding of software quality and reusable components. Software being a foundation of modern society, and Open Source development being a significant movement in society at large, it is critical to gain a deeper understanding of software quality on a global scale, leading to the development of innovative tools and methods.The metrics used in this study are those defined by the SQO-OSS Quality Model. To understand correlations, the following method will be used. First the dependency graph will be built, capturing software dependencies at the global scale. This requires overcoming technical challenges in cleaning up and clustering the data, as real world projects contain all sorts of idiosyncrasies related to the use of external components. Second, a suite of utilization metrics will be developed using this global dependency graph that capture the depth and breadth of component usage by these projects. Finally, the SQO-OSS Quality metrics for a significant subset of projects in the data set will be computed and compared with the projects' utilization metrics in order to reveal the correlations.