Research into technologies specifically supporting the development, deployment, evolution and benchmarking of open source software. Investigation into the use of open source models for improving software engineering. This investigation should be based on agreed indicators of
productivity and quality and result in a measurement of the economic impact of OSS.

The main outcomes of the QUALOSS project are the production of a methodology and a tool to assess the level of evolvability and robustness of open source software components. From these main goals of the QUALOSS project, one easily sees that QUALOSS directly and completely addresses the third focus stated above.

• The tooled methodology produced by QUALOSS will enable the benchmarking of open source software.
  
• By definition, our methodology is created to assess evolvability of open source software hence those that evaluate poorly in that domain can adjust their effort in order to become more evolvable.
  
• The assessment methodology will also guide programmers in their software engineering effort, that is, they will know the criteria of an evolvable and robust programme, i.e., the threshold of certain metrics that help a FLOSS component stay evolvable and robust.
  
• QUALOSS will start its investigation of quality characteristics based on the definitions provided by the ISO/IEC 9126 standard, which is an agreed indicator of quality.
• Our case studies will measure the usefulness of our methodology compared to relevant business information such as the ability to guarantee decrease in defects or in maintenance time based on an improvement in evolvability and robustness of the FLOSS components used hence indirectly our studies will measure the economic impact of OSS.