This will have two important impacts on software organisations :

• Firstly, the productivity will be enhanced due to the integration of already-made components.
  
• Secondly, the QUALOSS methodology guarantees that the FLOSS component satisfies the required levels of robustness and evolvability hence that the FLOSS community satisfies the required level of quality of service.
  

On the one hand, software developers will be able to quantitatively express the software requirements related to robustness and evolvability. And on the other hand, developers will be able to quantitatively specify the level of quality of service that the FLOSS community can provide. This both sides quantification will ease the assessment of the FLOSS components thanks the use of the automated measuring tools provided by the QUALOSS methodology. At the end, the software products made up of QUALOSS assessed FLOSS components will hold a higher level of robustness and evolvability, reducing the costs caused by software failures (lack of robustness) or the losses caused by the difficulty met by developers to modify a software (lack of evolvability).

Another important stakeholder affected by the QUALOSS methodology is the end user of the software service. Both qualities – evolvability and robustness – considered by the current project are important concerns regarding the end users interests.

On the one hand, more evolvable software will ensure the suitability of the software for the continuous changing needs of the ICT users. Moreover, an important cause that explains the IT projects failures stands in the difficulty to control the continuous changes of user requests and to implement these changes into the software. However, building software with very evolvable FLOSS components will ease their modifications, and allow the software developers to focus on the requirements specifications.

On the other hand, more robust software due to the use of the QUALOSS methodology will regain the confidence of ICT users. Lots of potential ICT users avoid using the software technologies due to their frequent failures (for instance the e-commerce application). Providing more robust software thanks to the QUALOSS methodology will bring them to a more widespread use of these software technologies, triggering a new wave of productivity increase.

The achievement of the QUALOSS project will positively affect the competitiveness of the European IT companies by allowing them to increase their productivity and providing more robust and evolvable software. It is important to notice that the chaotic situation described in the Standish report does not only involve European, US, or Japanese companies. Most of the countries with a serious software industry (India and China) met the same difficulties in producing evolvable and robust software. So, increasing the quality of the European software products and improving the productivity will support the competitive position of European software industry (notably SMEs).

There is a strong interest in implementing FLOSS solutions
amongst the public sector. The impact of the QUALOSS project on the public sector will be two-fold. Firstly, the public sector of many European countries develops their own software. Moreover, the use of FLOSS components in this public sector is growing. In this context, the QUALOSS assessment methodology represents the suitable means to assess the FLOSS components that will be integrated. Secondly, the public sector (for instance the French Community Parliament in Belgium) liberates some of their closed source software (release software under one of the FLOSS licences). In this case, using a means to objectively assess the software before liberating it represents an important task, which could be easily supported by the QUALOSS methodology. Furthermore, it would be interesting to monitor the community, which will support and develop the freed software. Actually, the QUALOSS methodology will allow such monitoring in an automatic and easy manner
(with the tooled methodology).

Finally, the FLOSS communities will also benefit from the QUALOSS methodology when using it to assess their own software, and also to monitor them. On the one hand, this will increase the robustness and the evolvability of the F/OSS when the QUALOSS methodology is used. On the other hand, the QUALOSS tooled methodology will automate the monitoring of the FLOSS communities by themselves. This will facilitate the management of these distributed communities by providing them relevant indicators of their activity (e.g. average response time in a mailing list, average number of bugs corrected per month).