OSS-AQM: An Open-Source Software Quality Model for Automated Quality Measurement

Abstract

Open-source software is growing in popularity today and has been used as a software tool or as a component in software development within organizations. Selecting quality open-source software is a challenging task. Several open-source quality models have been proposed to assess open-source software quality, but the assessment is rather limited because it is often subjective, relies on heavy user intervention, and requires information from different sources. To complement and enhance existing approaches to open-source quality assessment, this paper proposes a new open-source software quality model called OSS-AQM that aims at automating the measurement of open-source software quality. The OSS-AQM provides a set of quality metrics and an automation tool that can retrieve information about the open-source software from GitHub, source code, SonarQube, and Stack Exchange, and quantitatively determine the overall quality of the open-source software. In an experiment, the OSS-AQM is compared with an existing open-source software quality model to show how the proposed OSS-AQM and its tool can enhance open-source software comparison and facilitate open-source software selection.