In my non-KDE life, I’m working on quality
metrics for Open Source software, to be more precise, on the criteria for a standard for quality
certification of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). I’m talking a lot to different people about
such kind of new stuff, and generally people, especially from the “business world” like the idea
very much. ISVs are missing a certification that offers them the opportunity make a difference,
customers like the idea of being able to base their choice on hard criteria. My personal opinion is
that such a certificate is needed to show decision makers that Open Source can score very well in
the real world, that quality of Open Source products is not only good, but that it can be measured.
But how would you measure the quality of Open Source products from the point of view of a
customer? Quite often, you see that the time it takes “the community” to fix a certain bug is
measured. Well, that’s a beginning, but it’s definitely quite unusable as the only measurement for
the maintainance level of some software component. You have to put that in relation to the severity
of the bug, to the “risc level”. I think Open Source quality has to offer quite some more with
respect to quality, and some characteristics of Open Source software make quality assessment a fair
bit easier. You don’t need to sign NDAs to be able to review code and to do for example static
checking of the source base. You can have a look at the development process, you’re able to test the
software without the need to think about license questions, you’re able to look at history and you
might even take advantage of assessment that has earlier been made Hack, most Open Source components
even publish their bug database. So what more do you want?
A lot!
Fact is that a lot of Open Source project rely on peer-review as the only
means to improve and maintain good quality. While that certainly works for quite some projects, I
think it’s about time to apply more methods to maintain and improve quality of Open Source software.
In the near future, I’m planning to blog more often on different aspects of software
quality, especially in the Open Source world, to raise the awareness within the community, and
simply because it’s an interesting subject with a lot of different ways to approach it. So stay
tuned.