A model of open source software maintenance activities

The development of computer networks, especially the Internet, has largely facilitated the communications among software developers and it resulted a thriving of open source software systems (OSS). As more and more open source software systems are deployed by individuals and enterprises, it is vital to study such systems separately from traditional software systems since their development and maintenance processes are fairly different. In this paper, we investigate a type of behaviors of software maintenance of open source software systems and propose an approach that is based on NHPP with Rayleigh function to model the maintenance activities. Using the proposed model, the maintenance events could be estimated with high confidence and this will certainly assistant software maintenance planning. A numerical example using from the data from Apache project is shown to illustrate the application of our model.