On systems project abandonment: An analysis of complexity during development and evolution of FLOSS systems

Among all the reasons that leads to the success or failure of a Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) project, understanding the system's evolution can reveal important pieces of information to open source stakeholders, helping them to identify what can be improved in the software system's internal organization. Once software complexity is one of the most important attributes to determine software maintainability, controlling its level in the system evolution process makes the software easier to maintain, reducing the maintainability costs. Otherwise, uncontrolled complexity makes the maintenance and enhancement process lengthy, more costly and some times it can contribute to the system abandonment. This work investigates the evolution of complexity in discontinued FLOSS projects. After several analyses, the results showed that inactive FLOSS projects do not seem to be able to keep up with the extra work required to control the systems complexity, presenting a different behaviour of the successful active FLOSS projects.