Trustworthiness of collaborative Open Source Software quality assessment

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) projects have the unique opportunity to reach an unprecedented level of software quality by tapping into its community and collaborative power. However, the community process of collaborative software Quality Assessment (QA) may not reach its full potential or worse be easily jeopardised by malevolent entities because there is a lack of protection mechanisms, easy-to-use enabling mechanisms and clear incentives. We propose such mechanisms as part of a decentralised collaborative test and QA framework centred on the OSS actors.