Phylogenetic analysis of software evolution, a case study: VE&MINT
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Scientific Computing and Simulation, Software Engineering
- Keywords
- software evolution, open source
- Copyright
- © 2018 Ortiz-Troncoso
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Phylogenetic analysis of software evolution, a case study: VE&MINT. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27159v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27159v1
Abstract
Open source projects may face a forking situation at some point during their life-cycle. The traditional view is that forks are a waste of project resources and should be avoided. However, in a wider technological and organisational context, forks can be a way to foster the creation of a software ecosystem. Either way, forking is explicitly allowed by open source licenses. Notwithstanding, methods for quantifying the evolution of forks are currently scarce. The present work attempts to answer the question whether a real-life project has forked. It does so by considering code and organisational characteristics of the project, and analysing these characteristics by applying methods ported from biological phylogenetics. After finding that the project is forked, implications for project governance are discussed.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ Computer Science for review.