Software Quality Assessment of Open Source Software

The open source software ecosystem comprises more than a hundred thousand applications of varying quality. Individuals and organizations wishing to use open source software packages have scarce objective data to evaluate their quality. However, open source development projects by definition allow anybody to read, and therefore evaluate their source code. In addition, most projects also publish process-related artefacts, such as bug databases, mailing lists, and configuration management system logs. The software quality observatory is a platform that uses these product and process data sources to automatically evaluate the quality of open source projects. A plugin-based service-oriented architecture allows the mixing and matching of metrics extraction suites, source code repositories, and transformation filters. The resulting platform is aimed at IT consultants and managers, the open source community, and researchers.