Evolution of cyclomatic complexity in object oriented software

It is a generally accepted fact that software systems are constructed and gradually refined over a period of time. During this time, code is written and modified until stable releases of the system emerge. Many researchers have studied systems over a longer period of time in order to understand how they change and evolve. Despite these efforts, we still lack a precise understanding how various properties of software change over time, in particular in the area of object-oriented systems. Such an understanding is of great importance if we want to come up with techniques to provide feedback on the evolution of quality and predictions about further evolution of software systems. Historically, collection of sufficient data to build useful models was not practical as source code and build histories were not freely available. It is our opinion that by focusing our attention towards Open source software OSS) repositories, we have a better hope of building predictive models to help developers and managers. In this paper, we will report on an exploratory study analyzing object oriented OSS projects and present our findings based on this analysis.