To achieve this goal, we propose to build a high level methodology to benchmark the quality of open source software in order to ease the strategic decision of integrating adequate free and open source software (F/OSS) components into software systems. The results of the QUALOSS project directly address the strategic objective 2.5.5 of providing methodologies to use open source software into industrial development, to enable its benchmarking, and to support its development and evolution.

Two main outcomes of the QUALOSS project achieve our strategic objectives by delivering

• an assessment method for gauging the evolvability and robustness of open source software;

• a tool (the QUALOSS platform) that mostly automate the application of our QUALOSS method.

Unlike current assessment techniques, ours combines data from various sources: source code, documentation as well as data about the developer community supporting the software products in order to estimate the evolvability and robustness of the evaluate software products.

In fact, QUALOSS takes advantage of information widely available in F/OSS repositories that often contains many types of information, that is, software product data and other data produced by the developer community while developing and maintaining the software product. Our tool plans on automating most of computation when applying our QUALOSS quality models. However, it is unlikely that every aspect can be automated, especially if we want precise quality models. In turn, the user of the QUALOSS platform will have to intervene at certain step in order to obtain better quality estimates. For the user to accomplish the manual step objectively, a user manual/guide will be joined to our tool. This manual must first explain how to perform the manual activities in order to apply our quality models, second, how to use the results computed by our quality models. In the end, our tools and the user manual provide the user with an integrated assessment method for gauging the quality of F/OSS components.

Ultimately, our tooled methodology reaches the strategic objectives stated above. Our conjecture is that by integrating more evolvable and robust F/OSS components in their solutions, organization will spend less time fighting with the F/OSS component hence will be more productive. This proposition will be investigated through cases studies.