Quality of Open Source Systems from Product Metrics Perspective
This work addresses software quality assessment for developers and engineers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing metric-based approaches without introducing new methods.
The study analyzed product metrics from open source software to assess quality attributes, finding that defect density is low in open source projects and decreases with larger product sizes, and that most metrics positively correlate with bug counts except for coupling between cohesion among methods of class.
Software engineering and information systems practices seek ultimately to create the flawless product. One of the tools used to improve the quality of software development is the use of metrics. In this paper, metrics retrieved from open source software were analyzed for quality attributes. Defect density is considered a strong indication of the quality of software product. Few studies have taken into consideration the density of defects while looking into quality of software and proneness to defects. Analysis of this study has shown that defect density is relevant to different developers and different product sizes. Thus, open source project has shown to have low defect density and the larger the product the lower the defect density is. In addition, this study has shown that there are different metrics that correlate with each other indicating that some of these metrics have conceptual and practical relevance to each other. Another relationship was tested between the number of bugs and the metrics. Results indicated that most attributes had positive correlation with the number of bugs with exception to coupling between cohesion among methods of class.