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Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems

Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems, Volume 35

On the Applicability of the Pareto Principle to Source-Code Growth in Open Source Projects

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2023F5221

Citation: Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems, M. Ganzha, L. Maciaszek, M. Paprzycki, D. Ślęzak (eds). ACSIS, Vol. 35, pages 781–789 ()

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Abstract. Context: research on understanding the laws related to software-project evolution can indirectly impact the way we design software development processes, e.g., knowing the nature of the code-repository content growth could help us improve the ways we monitor the progress of OSS software development projects and predict their future development Goal: our aim is to empirically verify a hypothesis that the OSS code repositories grow in size according to the Pareto principle. Method: we collected and curated a sample of 31,343 OSS code repositories hosted on GitHub and analyzed their content growth over time to verify whether it follows the Pareto principle. Results: we observed that, on average, monotonically growing OSS repositories reach 75\% of their final content size within the first 25\% revisions. Conclusions: the content size of monotonically growing OSS repositories seems to grow in size according to the Pareto principle with the 75/25 ratio.

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