Results from Digital Archeology include the ability to determine why the software is changed, how difficult each change is, to evaluate the impact of a software tool or process, and to predict risk that a change will break existing features. Digital Archeology also allows quantification of key features of a development process including Open Source development process. Details are in the Apache server case study and the scripts used in the times ) --> Apache and Mozilla study.
Software development practice is experiencing a radical change driven by the open source movement, the business needs to move development to low-cost locations, the aging and renewal of core developers in legacy products, recruiting in fast growing Internet companies, and the turmoil of the economy causing unprecedented turnover in software projects. The investigations on transfer of work and the associated phenomena related to organizational change and the growth of software project competencies clarify th
Given the diversity of software projects and the creative nature of software development, the context may strongly affect project's sucess. Multi-company studies [ ASM08 , MNT09 , CMRH09 ] took into account not only technical, but also social [ HM03b , CMRH09 ] aspects of software development. Surprisingly, a software project with identical requirements may cost an order of magnitude more and require correspondingly more effort simply because of the differences in the nature of company's customer base [ ASM