Variation of Defects and Complexity in Multiple versions of Open-Source Projects

Studies has showed that the number of pre delivery defects increases with the complexity of the system. The aim of our research is to establish whether such a phenomenon applies to the post-delivery defects. We do this by studying and analysing different software products and the number of reported post-delivery defects for their respective versions. Our research is currently based on the work of Card and Glass [2], Awang Abu Bakar and Boughton [1] who argued that software system complexity measures are predictors of defects. The work of Card and Glass [2] is based on structural design software and the work of Awang Abu Bakar and Boughton [1] is with object-oriented software. We studied five open-source, object oriented systems downloaded from SourceForge.net [14]. Our initial result demonstrates that system complexity does predict post-delivery defects, but that the relationship is not as strong as for pre-delivery defects. We also demonstrate how various indicating parameters of a open source software changes with versions.