Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
The QualOSS Process Evaluation:
Initial Experiences with Assessing Open Source Processes
Martín Soto and Marcus Ciolkowski
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering
Fraunhofer-Platz 1
67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
{soto,ciolkows}@iese.fraunhofer.de
Abstract.
For traditional software development, process maturity models
(CMMI, SPICE) have long been used to assess expected product quality and
project predictability. For the case of OSS, however, these models are generally
perceived as inadequate. In practice, though, many OSS communities are well-
organized, and there is evidence of varying levels of process maturity in OSS
projects. This paper presents work in progress—performed as part of the EU
project QualOSS—on developing a process evaluation framework specifically
aimed at OSS projects. We present a first version of our evaluation procedures,
and discuss some lessons learned during its preliminary application to a small
number of OSS projects.
Keywords:
Software process, Open Source Software, OSS, process assessment,
process evaluation, QualOSS, software quality.
1 Introduction
Since the introduction of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in the early 1980s,
maturity-oriented process assessment models have become a fundamental tool for
determining the extent to which an organization can deliver software on time and with
an acceptable level of quality. Currently, the most prominent examples of such proc-
ess assessment models are CMMI-DEV (Capability Maturity Model® Integration for
Development [10]) and SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability
dEtermination [4]).
The growing popularity of Open Source Software (OSS) constitutes a big chal-
lenge to software process assessment, since, at first sight, maturity-oriented models
appear very difficult to apply to OSS development. On the one hand, they seem to
expect an organizational structure that is not present in most OSS communities, and,
on the other hand, it is a widespread belief that OSS communities operate in an essen-
tially chaotic way, and that, for this reason, no systematic development processes can
be taking place during OSS development. Consequently, most casual observers would
regard traditional maturity models as completely inappropriate for OSS software.
We disagree with this vision. The main assumption underlying process assessment
approaches is that mature processes consistently lead to higher-quality products,
