Evaluating the Quality of Free/Open Source Projects

Characterization and evaluation of software quality is one of the main challenge of software engineering. One of currently used standards is ISO/IEC 9126, which defines a quality model for software products. However, in the context of Free/Open Source software, differences in production, distribution and support modality, have to be considered as additional quality characteristics apart from ISO standard ones. This paper defines a quality model for Free/Open Source Software projects, equipped with an evaluation framework, realized by applying the Goal Question Metric paradigm. The evaluation of an open source system has been carried out as case study.