The Study of Code Reviews based on Software Maintainability in Open Source Projects

Abstract

Recently, open source software (OSS) applications have been widely adopting. However, the OSS projects have problems in the software quality, such as security and maintainability. Generally, software engineers focus on the software maintainability because this quality attribute can reduce the cost and increase the productivity of software development. To better understand how the OSS developers improve the source code based on a software maintenance perspective; this research aims to investigate how the developers are interested in the maintainability under the peer code review of the OSS projects. We analyzed whether the code authors changed their code based on the code review's comments related to maintenance issues by examining two OSS projects. We found that the OSS developer community tends to pay more attention to software maintainability. Finally, we expect that this research will increase the empirical evidence about the quality of OSS projects, particularly maintainability.