Ioannis Samoladas

The SQO-OSS Quality Model: Measurement Based Open Source Software Evaluation

Software quality evaluation has always been an important part of software business. The quality evaluation process is usually based on hierarchical quality models that measure various aspects of software quality and deduce a characterization of the product quality being evaluated. The particular nature of open source software has rendered existing models inappropriate for detailed quality evaluations. In this paper, we present a hierarchical quality model that evaluates source code and community processes, based on automatic calculation of metric values and their correlation to a set of predefined quality profiles.1

Open source software development should strive for even greater code maintainability

A study of almost six million lines of code tracks how freely accessible source code holds up against time and multiple iterations.

Evaluating the Quality of Open Source Software

Traditionally, research on quality attributes was either kept under wraps within the organization that performed it, or carried out by outsiders using narrow, black-box techniques. The emergence of open source software has changed this picture allowing us to evaluate both software products and the processes that yield them. Thus, the software source code and the associated data stored in the version control system, the bug tracking databases, the mailing lists, and the wikis allow us to evaluate quality in a transparent way. Even better, the large number of (often competing) open source projects makes it possible to contrast the quality of comparable systems serving the same domain. Furthermore, by combining historical source code snapshots with significant events, such as bug discoveries and fixes, we can further dig into the causes and effects of problems. Here we present motivating examples, tools, and techniques that can be used to evaluate the quality of open source (and by extension also proprietary) software.

Survival analysis on the duration of open source projects

Context: Open source (FLOSS) project survivability is an important piece of information for many open source stakeholders. Coordinators of open source projects would like to know the chances for the survival of the projects they coordinate. Companies are also interested in knowing how viable a project is in order to either participate or invest in it, and volunteers want to contribute to vivid projects. Objective: The purpose of this article is the application of survival analysis techniques for estimating the future development of a FLOSS project. Method: In order to apply such approach, duration data regarding FLOSS projects from the FLOSSMETRICS (This work was partially supported by the European Communitys Sixth Framework Program under the Contract FP6-033982) database were collected. Such database contains metadata for thousands of FLOSS projects, derived from various forges. Subsequently, survival analysis methods were employed to predict the survivability of the projects, i.e. their probability of continuation in the future, by examining their duration, combined with other project characteristics such as their application domain and number of committers. Results: It was shown how probability of termination or continuation may be calculated and how a prediction model may be built to upraise project future. In addition, the benefit of adding more committers to FLOSS projects was quantified. Conclusion: Analysis results demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed framework for assessing the survival probability of a FLOSS project.

Emerging Free and Open Source Software Practices

Project infrastructure and software repositories are now widely available at low cost with easy extraction, providing a foundational base to conduct detailed cyber-archeology at a scale not open to researchers before. Emerging Free and Open Source Software Practices provides a collection of empirical research acting as a focal point to the status of these repositories and infrastructures along with the F/OSS project. Emerging Free and Open Source Software Practices presents a framework and state-of-the-art references on F/OSS projects, reporting on past and on-going case studies of projects covering a wide range of F/OSS applications and domains. This book postulates trends in the evolution of software practices and solutions to the challenges ubiquitous nature free and open source software provides.

ASPIS: an automated information system for certification and analysis of examination process

One of the innovations that the usage of Internet has introduced is distance learning. Along with distance learning came the requirement for distance certification. While there are organizations that support the certification process, the provided support in Greece is relatively limited inflexible. In this paper we describe the first to our best knowledge, system that automates the certification process. The proposed system takes into account various learning parameters and makes use of the feedback of the process, along with the help of the data mining on the certification results. In this paper, we describe processes necessary for distance certification, the system itself and we present some results of the data mining we applied on the systems preliminary data.