Quality Improvement in Volunteer Free Software Projects: Exploring the Impact of Release Management

Even though free software has achieved great popularity and success in recent years, there are a number of product quality challenges facing the open source development model. There is significant room for further quality improvement and one area that deserves special attention is release management. This research will identify problems with current release practices, verify possible advantages of an increasingly popular release model, and develop interventions to improve release management in free software projects. The research also aims to answer the fundamental question as to how volunteer projects can deliver predictable and high quality software.