The Evolution of Software

An anonymous reader writes "Russian physicists Gorshenev and Pis'mak have posted a preprint claiming evidence that software projects naturally attain a state of self-organized criticality, in a process analogous to the contested theory of punctuated equilibrium in biological evolution (see also this paper by Bak and Boettcher). The software projects studied are FreeBSD, Mozilla, and GNU Emacs, by analyzing data from their CVS checkins."

Huh?

[vudu]

The what of the huh did what?

Huh?

To reiterate...
WTF?

Re:Huh?

[jo42]

Must be a Windows user...

Re:Huh?

[jpsst34]

I'm sitting here at my desk at work. When I read your post I starting laughing and quicly raised my hand to cover my mouth. Now I have a bloody nose. Thanks a lot, wanker!

So....

[Randolpho]

"software projects naturally attain a state of self-organized criticality," eh?

Clearly they've never looked at the code I have to maintain!

Not a large stretch of the imagination

[runswithd6s]

I'm not surprised someone is using punctuated equilibrium to explain some of the development patterns in Free Software. Short periods of intense development followed by long periods of inactivity. Sounds like a pattern of a volunteer developer to me, giving his or her free time to a project. Since free time rarely occurs as contiguous segments, the parallelism to punctuated equilibrium is easy to see. I just hope this paper doesn't earn these two yokels anything but a quick pat on the back for pointing out the obvious.

Re:Not a large stretch of the imagination

[Arandir]

Here's the real story:

I've spent every minute of available free time for the past two months hacking on my project. I've finally uploaded libfu-3.2.7 final. My eyes don't focus, my girlfriend left me, and my cat stopped leaving dead mice in my slippers. So for the next two months I'm not touching any code.

That's why you get punctuated equilibrium.

Re:Not a large stretch of the imagination

[NDPTAL85]

Um was typing code on your computer really more important than paying attention to your girlfriend?

hmm...

[ElectronOfAtom]

buzzword bingo anyone?
It's time to qualitize our paradigms for increased marketplace productivity and to keep employee morale high by constant restructuring and ...
or.. to quote Dilbert, My SPOO has too much FLEEM

Did anyone understand this post?

Biologically massive software development

[TuringTest]

If you are interested in how software development can be addressed vith unusual points of view, you can read also this article:

Mob Software: The Erotic Life of Code [dreamsongs.com]
An Essay in First Person by
Richard P. Gabriel & Ron Goldman

It has been previously discussed in Slashdot [slashdot.org].

Correction

[OECD]

Russian physicists Gorshenev and Pis'mak...

Gorshenev is a Russian, but I'm pretty sure Pis'mak is a Vulcan.

Stating the obvious

[achacha]

I wonder how long it took these guys to obfuscate the obvious that any software developer learned in CS101?! All they are saying that after a certain time the software development process (i.e. CVS checkin data) reaches an equilibrium only perturbed by small changes.

Well if that wasn't the most complicated summary of the software development process, I don't know what is.

Yes there are a lot of changes initially, since the product is being written, then as it reaches alpha the features taper off (thus the

Re:Stating the obvious

[Hognoxious]

I do wish these academics would try and write about something that will move us forward, rather than taking ideas that are well known and obfuscating them

Academics? Do something useful?
That's kind of like wishing that dogs are pink with flat snouts and make grunting noises.

Restating the obvious

[weierstrass]

Or in layman's terms:

Like animals, software tends to change a lot until it becomes pretty good, and then not change as much any more.

Not Stating the obvious

[tree_frog]

Err, no. That is precisely not what they are saying. They describe software as reaching a state of Self-Organized Criticallity. This is analogous to a sandpile (the codebase) onto which sand is being continuously poured. What happens is the slopes of the sandpile start avalanching (code changes) as sand is pored on. The interesting thing is that a certain relationship is observed between the size of avalanches (code changes) and their frequency.

In software terms, what this means is not that code gets more