A Study of Quantitative Progress Evaluation Models for Open Source Projects

Abstract

Open source software (OSS) has become an indispensable part of society, not only for personal use but also for corporate use. Projects developed and operated by OSS are called open source projects, and the number of such projects is increasing. On the other hand, because anyone can participate in an open source project, the progress of the project is uncertain due to differences in project members’ skills, development environments, and time zones of activity. Therefore, many users and companies need to understand the development and operation status of open source project. Then, the developers carefully make decisions on upgrading or installing new OSS. In this paper, we focus on the maintenance effort estimation for open source projects considering uncertainty. Also, we evaluate the project quantitatively using Earned Value Management (EVM). Moreover, we examine the appropriateness of the model for predicting the maintenance effort expeditures. Furthermore, we discuss the appropriateness of this EVM method.