Analysing the reliability of open source software projects

Evaluation of software quality is one of the main challenges of software engineering. Several researches proposed in literature the definition of quality models for evaluating software products. However, in the context of Free/Open Source software, differences in production, distribution and support modality, have to be considered as additional quality characteristics. In particular, software reliability should be taken into account before selecting software components. In this direction, this paper evolves a quality model for Free/Open Source Software projects, called EFFORT - Evaluation Framework for Free/Open souRce projects for including reliability aspects and presents an empirical study aimed at assessing software reliability and its evolution along the software project history.