Overview

Introduction

The Open Source Software Development (OSSD) model has launched products in rapid succession and with high quality, without following traditional quality practises of accepted software development models (Raymond 1999). Some OSSD projects challenge established quality assurance approaches, claiming to be successful through partially contrary techniques of standard software development.

The aim of this research is to improve the understanding of quality assurance practices under the OSSD model, which can be characterised by a collaborative, distributed development approach with public communication, free participation, free joining to the project for newcomers and unlimited access to the source code.

We hypothesize that successful projects follow similar key processes to assure software quality under the OSSD. The aim of this research is to investigate these key processes and to show their interactions in a process model. The model offers processes to assure that the product achieves its quality goals.

The entire approach reflects a process model, a process assessment and success measurement approach that are consolidated in the Quality Assurance Framework for Open Source Software (QAfOSS). The process model is a “blueprint of how to organise, implement, conduct, and manage software engineering processes in an organisation” (Wang and King, 2000).