An Investigation into quality assurance of the Open Source Software Development model

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThe Open Source Software Development (OSSD) model has launched products in rapid succession and with high quality, without following traditional quality practices of accepted software development models (Raymond 1999). Some OSSD projects challenge established quality assurance approaches, claiming to be successful through partial contrary techniques of standard software development. However, empirical studies of quality assurance practices for Open Source Software (OSS) are rare (Glass 2001). Therefore, further research is required to evaluate the quality assurance processes and methods within the OSSD model. The aim of this research is to improve the understanding of quality assurance practices under the OSSD model. The OSSD model is characterised by a collaborative, distributed development approach with public communication, free participation, free entry to the project for newcomers and unlimited access to the source code. The research examines applied quality assurance practices from a process view rather than from a product view. The research follows ideographic and nomothetic methodologies and adopts an antipositivist epistemological approach. An empirical research of applied quality assurance practices in OSS projects is conducted through the literature research. The survey research method is used to gain empirical evidence about applied practices. The findings are used to validate the theoretical knowledge and to obtain further expertise about practical approaches. The findings contribute to the development of a quality assurance framework for standard OSSD approaches. The result is an appropriate quality model with metrics that the requirements of the OSSD support. An ideographic approach with case studies is used to extend the body of knowledge and to assess the feasibility and applicability of the quality assurance framework. In conclusion, the study provides further understanding of the applied quality assurance processes under the OSSD model and shows how a quality assurance framework can support the development processes with guidelines and measurements

A Review Framework for Open Source Oriented Software

Software Quality Assurance is an essential yet challenging process which consists of several milestones. There exist several Quality assurance models and frameworks (both fixed and flexible) for reviewing software of any type. Fixed models consist of fixed set of quality attributes and their measures, whereas for the flexible model the attributes are decided or chosen based on requirement set of the product. Earliest models like McCall’s, Boehm’s, FURPS and ISO/IEC 9126 are examples of fixed models. Whereas, Prometheus model developed in 2003 is an example of flexible model. It means, ever since 1977, there have been quite a lot of QA models, frameworks and standards published, in order to ease the vigorous process of QA. Most of these models are product-centric. Most of the product-centric QA models are the derived work of McCall’s model, Boehm’s model, Garvin’s model, FURPS framework and ISO/IEC 9126 standard in one way or another (in lower or higher degree). Hence, these primitive models are somehow the base models. For several reasons, not all the base models are completely applicable; not at least to Open Source Software (OSS). OSS is a movement or a philosophy where software and its binary are freely available to everyone allowing modification or redistribution. There are 3 major dimensions through which OSS could be observed; as a Community, as a Licensing model and as a development Method. There are several widely adopted trends followed in typical OSS development. One of which is to present a mature enough product to a community and ask them to contribute in different ways. Here the mature product includes a set of initial design, deliverables including requirements specifications and available source code (if any). In this typical trend, the community members are geographically diverse or distributed. In contrary to the typical development setting there exists a varied development setting of OSS. In this setting, the development starts and continues as in-house project by a small group of core developers who were solely responsible for designing the software, choosing the development settings, choosing the licenses, implementing, doing the market research, testing the software, registering it on public forge and finally releasing the software. The software is, at the end, publicized to the open source community as OSS. The initial development does not include anyone else than the core developers. These core developers are not geographically diverse. These core developers or the project team uniquely owns the right for the initial state of the software. For these variations we call this type of software Open Source Oriented Software (OSOS). There subsist some differences; therefore, the available QA models for OSS are not completely applicable for OSOS. In order to fill this gap, we propose a framework which could be used to review software adopting OSOS development setting. We called this framework LCM framework. The reason behind the name is the three aforementioned perspectives towards OSS namely Licensing, Community and Method. In order to attain this framework, the base models are comprehensively analyzed towards our requirements. LCM framework consists of quality attributes and sub-attributes as the measures. These attributes are then categorized as Community Compliance Attributes, Licensing Compliance Attributes and Method Compliance Attributes. In order to assure the result, LCM framework was used over OSOS named Solution to Open Land Administration (SOLA) developed by United Nation Food and Agriculture Organization. Four different versions of SOLA application were reviewed using the LCM framework. The results encountered for each review helped improve the quality of later versions of SOLA application. The results of SOLA review are divided into three parts; behavioral analysis results for, Community Compliance Attributes, Licensing Compliance Attributes and Method Compliance Attributes. Static analysis (code analysis) on the other hand was the basis of comparison for most of the behavioral analysis results for Community Compliance Attributes and Licensing Compliance Attributes. The static review was performed based on the data collected by Sonar, which is an open source quality management platform, dedicated to measure source code quality. The LCM framework when used over an open source project yield improving results. Therefore, it could be said that LCM framework is adoptable to all the software developed with OSOS development setting. However, the choice of attributes according to the stage of development is different for software with different requirements