TY - JOUR T1 - Measuring Modularity in Open Source Code Bases JF - Open Source Business Resource Y1 - 2009 A1 - Steven Muegge A1 - Roberto Milev AB - Modularity of an open source software code base has been associated with growth of the software development community, the incentives for voluntary code contribution, and a reduction in the number of users who take code without contributing back to the community. As a theoretical construct, modularity links OSS to other domains of research, including organization theory, the economics of industry structure, and new product development. However, measuring the modularity of an OSS design has proven difficult, especially for large and complex systems. In this article, we describe some preliminary results of recent research at Carleton University that examines the evolving modularity of large-scale software systems. We describe a measurement method and a new modularity metric for comparing code bases of different size, introduce an open source toolkit that implements this method and metric, and provide an analysis of the evolution of the Apache Tomcat application server as an illustrative example of the insights gained from this approach. Although these results are preliminary, they open the door to further cross-discipline research that quantitatively links the concerns of business managers, entrepreneurs, policy-makers, and open source software developers. PB - Talent First Network CY - Ottawa UR - http://timreview.ca/article/245 IS - April 2009 U1 - Carleton University Steven Muegge is a faculty member of the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Professor Muegge teaches within the Technology Innovation Management program. His current research interests include open source software, open innovation, and open source ecosystems. U2 - Carleton University Roberto Milev completed an M.Eng. degree in Technology Innovation Management in 2008. As part of his research into open source software, he derived the relative clustered cost metric and developed the jDSM open source toolset for computing DSMs and modularity metrics. He is currently working as a manager for a software development company. ER -