Authors: Matulevičius R., Kamseu F. & Habra N.

Abstract: "Software quality is rather a necessity than an option. And although there exists a number of quality models for the general software, little is done for the quality of the open source software (OSS). To support stakeholders with proper software products, these have to contain a high-quality documentation. In addition, this documentation quality should be assessable to allow well-founded decision-making. However, this is not always the case, and especially not for OSS. A lack of documentation results in a poor understanding, application, and resource consumption when using, developing, and evaluating OSS. In this paper we consider how we could assess the quality of the OSS documentation. We present a quality model that supports assessment of availability of the OSS documentation. Our model provides the means to assess documentation availability by fulfilling different stakeholders’ goals addressing OSS acquisition, usage, and development. Once the information on the available documents is collected it can be used for comparing different OSS before acquiring them to organisation’s purposes, or when estimating the overall quality of the organisation’s work processes. We have applied our proposal on two OSS projects, namely Findbugs and k3b. Our investigation resulted in a number of learnt lessons presented in this paper".

Publisher:  dpunkt.verlag GmbH