Leveraging Open-Source Communities To Improve the Quality & Performance of Open-Source Software

Open-source processes have emerged as an effective approach to reduce cycle-time and decrease development and quality assurance costs for certain types of software. they are not without challenges, however, such as decreasing long-term maintenance and evolution costs, improving quality assurance, sustaining end-user confidence and good will, and ensuring the coherency of system-wide software and usability properties. Although aspects of these issues are unique to open-source development, well-organized open-source projects make it easier to address certain of these challenges compared with traditional closed-source approaches to building software.
We have begun a long-term research effort, called Skoll, whose goal is to leverage common open-source project assets, such as their technologically sophisticated worldwide user communities, to devise techniques that address key challenges of open-source software development. In particular, we are conducting a long-term case study of two widely used open-source projects, ACE and TAO, to design, deploy, and evaluate techniques for improving quality through continuous distributed testing and profiling. This position paper presents our view of the pros and cons of open-source processes and outlines the work we are doing to improve the quality and performance of open-source software.