A Proposal of NHPP-Based Method for Predicting Code Change in Open Source Development

This paper proposes a novel method for predicting the amount of source code changes (changed lines of code: changed-LOC) in the open source development (OSD). While the software evolution can be observed through the public code repository in OSD, it is not easy to understand and predict the state of the whole development because of the huge amount of less-organized information.The method proposed in the paper predicts the code changes by using only data freely available from the code repository the code-change time stamp and the changed-LOC.The method consists of two steps: 1) to predict the number of occurrences of code changes by using a non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP)-based model, and 2) to predict the amount of code changes by using the outcome of the step-1 and the previously changed-LOC.The empirical work shows that the proposed method has an ability to predict the changed-LOC in the next 12 months with less than 10% error.