Abstract
Abstract: software systems progressively evolve over time where source code needs to be modified, newly are added and others need to be deleted. Therefore, it is worth to monitor progress and software development, to measure growth and assess system stability. This paper assesses OSS software growth and instability to clarify impacts of its instability on its system growth. Three open source software applications, with different characteristics, have been selected. Size and instability metrics are extracted and statistically analyzed in order to assess the reflections of software growth under instability behaviors.