Measuring OSS quality trough centrality

Abstract

In this study, we explore whether the degree of centrality, betweenness and density of the open source software or OSS team communications network have any bearing on the quality of the software developed. We measure the quality of OSS in terms of number of defect fixed per software promotion, the number of defects reported at different severity levels and the average number of days for a defect to be fixed for each project team. The data required to conduct the analysis needs to be of OSS projects, their team structure and also contribution of the projects user community and immediate development team. We extract the communications pattern of OSS projects development teams from online forums or message boards as the developers are usually located in different geographic areas. We use SorceForge.net for collecting relevant coordination related data for this study; which is the central resource for hosting more than 100,000 open source development projects and with over 1 million registered users that participate in the development of high profile OSS projects. The outcome of this study suggests that there is a correlation between social network characteristics and strong and poor performing projects in an OSS environment. Copyright 2008 ACM.