Software Quality Assessment of Open Source Software

The idea

Sourceforge alone listed 138,000 projects when this was written, many of them overlapping in function, and anyone choosing between them had almost no objective evidence to go on. But open source projects publish their source, and most publish their version control logs, their bug databases and their mailing lists too. The software quality observatory turns those into an automatic evaluation.

Contributions

• The architecture of the SQO-OSS platform core: plugin-based and service-oriented, so metric suites, source repositories and transformation filters can be mixed and matched.
• A design that combines well-known product and process metrics with quality indicators drawn from data sources nobody was using.
• A statement of who it is for — IT consultants and managers, the open source community, and researchers — which is unusual enough to be worth noting in a platform paper.

The quality model it works against is ISO/IEC 9126's six characteristics, with the observation that requirements and testing usually concentrate on functionality and neglect the other five, which is where perceived quality actually comes from.

Where it sits

The fuller account, with the platform named Alitheia, is the 2009 ENTCS paper.