Exploratory Analysis of Quality Practices in Open Source Domain
This addresses the gap in understanding quality management for OSS developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing research in software quality.
The paper conducted a survey to analyze quality practices in open source software (OSS) communities, comparing them with closed-source environments and confirming distinct features of OSS quality assurance.
Software quality assurance has been a heated topic for several decades, but relatively few analyses were performed on open source software (OSS). As OSS has become very popular in our daily life, many researchers have been keen on the quality practices in this area. Although quality management presents distinct patterns compared with those in closed-source software development, some widely used OSS products have been implemented. Therefore, quality assurance of OSS projects has attracted increased research focuses. In this paper, a survey is conducted to reveal the general quality practices in open source communities. Exploratory analysis has been carried out to disclose those quality related activities. The results are compared with those from closed-source environments and the distinguished features of the quality assurance in OSS projects have been confirmed. Moreover, this study suggests potential directions for OSS developers to follow.