QualOSS

= a Quality Assessment of FOSS methodology

Description

"QualOSS provides a high-level methodology for benchmarking the quality of FOSS. Main quality focus for the benchmarking are the “Evolvability” and “Robustness” of FOSS (Deprez et al., 2008):

• “Robustness” is defined to be the capability that the FOSS endeavour displayed/-s in solving past and current problems.

• “Evolvability” is defined to be the capability that the FOSS endeavour will likely display in solving future problems.

QualOSS uses the term “FOSS endeavour” instead of FOSS project. A FOSS endeavour is defined by the following four elements: 1) A set of work products, 2) the FOSS community creating, updating and using these work products, 3) the tools used to act on these work products or to build or run the software product, and 4) the set of development processes executed by the community, these processes include rules and a division of labour accepted and followed by community members when interacting and creating work products” (Ruiz and Glott, 2009). The third element has so far not materialised into QualOSS.

Figure 5.2 illustrates the structure of the QualOSS Standard Assessment Method, starting with the defined quality focus (robustness and evolvability) as the root node, further decomposed into the FOSS endeavour elements (software product, community members, software process), and ending up with a set of subgoals as the leafs. Various metrics are further associated with each of the leaf characteristics.

The overall purpose is to evaluate the degree of risk for selected (or all) leaf characteristics, related to a selected context with specified viewpoints. The QualOSS Standard Assessment Method represent one specific predefined configuration, context (Usage=integration in a product, Mode=product comparison, Collaboration=full FOSS collaboration) with a set of viewpoints (long term management viewpoint, short term management viewpoint, long term technical viewpoint, short term technical viewpoint). The intension behind the possibility of making configurations is to “tune” the measurement to specific business cases. Depending on the configuration, only the most relevant metrics will be used. But since only one standardised configuration exist,the QualOSS Standard Assessment Method, more details regarding configurations will not be pursued in any more depth here." (http://publications.nr.no/Compendium-INF5780H11.pdf)