An empirical study on the software quality evolution trends of open source software projects

Objective evaluation of the quality level of a software product is a relevant aspect for supporting software engineers' work. This is particularly true when an Open Source Software system has to be adopted in an operative context. In this case, the assessment of its quality should be taken into account before choosing to adopted it. In this direction, this paper presents an empirical study aimed at assessing the quality of open source software projects along their life, through the gathering and analysis of relevant information. The analysis of the considered software projects required the evaluation of the software products quality, attractiveness and community trustworthiness, and the related trends are presented as results.