Collecting data about FLOSS development: the FLOSSMetrics experience

The FLOSSMetrics project has set up a system that has already collected detailed information from software development repositories of about 3,000 FLOSS (free, libre, open source software) projects. The system is capable of retrieving data from source code management, mailing lists, and issue tracking repositories. All the data obtained is stored in an SQL database, with a structure intended to facilitate further analysis and studies. All the data is also published, so that researchers can use it for their own purposes. This paper describes how FLOSSMetrics can be used to better understand how a FLOSS project is developed, and how several projects can be compared, by analyzing some VoIP clients.