SQO-OSS Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software

What do we know about the quality of the software you are using?  A well-known conjecture in software engineering is that external quality characteristics are correlated to internal quality characteristics and thus the measurement of source code provides useful data for the assessment of its quality. Uniquely, open source software allows us to examine the actual code and perform white box testing and analysis of it. In most open source projects we can also access their version control system, mailing lists and issue databases. We can use these data sources to extract quality indicators through techniques, such as data mining. SQO-OSS aims to increase the competitiveness of European software development SMEs through a holistic approach of software quality assessment, initially targeting open source software. The project seeks to use as many sources of quality indicators as possible so as to create a set of metrics that can be applied automatically to a software project’s repository in order to extract quantifiable measurements of its quality.