SQO-OSS — Source Quality Observatory for Open Source Software

Project Code: IST-2005-33331 (International)
Funding programme: FP6/IST
Funding Agency: European Commission
Project type: RTD
Web site: http://www.sqo-oss.eu/
Starting date: 2006-09-01
Ending date: 2008-10-31
AUEB budget: 378,000
Total budget: 1,638,800

Project manager: Georgios Gousios
Scientific coordinator: Diomidis Spinellis
Contact: Diomidis Spinellis

Description

What do we know about the quality of the software you are using?  A well-known conjecture  in software engineering is that external quality characteristics are correlated to internal quality  characteristics and thus the measurement of source code provides useful data for the  assessment of its quality. Uniquely, open source software allows us to examine the actual  code and perform white box testing and analysis of it. In most open source projects we can  also access their version control system, mailing lists and issue databases.  We can use these  data sources to extract quality indicators through techniques, such as data mining.  SQO-OSS aims to increase the competitiveness of European software development SMEs  through a holistic approach of software quality assessment, initially targeting open source  software. The project seeks to use as many sources of quality indicators as possible so as to  create a set of metrics that can be applied automatically to a software project’s repository in  order to extract quantifiable measurements of its quality.  The project will deliver:

A plug-in based quality assessment platform, featuring a web and an idE front-end. An enhanced set of software metrics that will take into account quality indicators from data that is present in a project’s repository, but not yet used for quality assessment. A publicly available league of open source software applications, categorised by their quality characteristics. A methodology that will allow European SMEs to leverage the availability of quality-assessed open source software in the development of horizontal and vertical applications and the provision of value-added services. Experience reports of how the tool’s application affected a large open source project

The project leverages existing tools and will also create new ones in an effort to build an integrated quality assessment platform. The core will be released as open source software  under the BSD licence to stimulate business interest around it.

Partners

    • DB-NET (GR)

    • AUTH-PLASE (GR)

    • PROSYST (DE)

    • SIRIUS (UK)

    • KDAB (SE)

    • KDE (DE)

Publications

Journal Articles

    • Diomidis Spinellis. Optimizing header file include directives. Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice, 21(4):233–251, July/August 2009.

    • Diomidis Spinellis and Panagiotis Louridas. The collaborative organization of knowledge. Communications of the ACM, 51(8):68–73, August 2008.

    • Diomidis Spinellis. The Antikythera mechanism: a computer science perspective. IEEE Computer, 41(5):22–27, May 2008.

    • Panagiotis Louridas, Diomidis Spinellis, and Vasileios Vlachos. Power laws in software. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 18(1):1–26, September 2008. Article 2.

Book Chapters

    • Adriaan de Groot, Sebastian Kügler, Paul Adams, and Georgios Gousios. Call for quality: open source software quality observation. In Ernesto Damiani, Brian Fitzgerald, Walt Scacchi, Marco Scotto, and Giancarlo Succi, editors, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, volume 203/2006, pages 57–62. Springer Boston, 2006.

Conference Publications

    • Georgios Gousios and Diomidis Spinellis. Alitheia core: an extensible software quality monitoring platform. In ICSE '09: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering – Formal Research Demonstrations Track, 579–582. IEEE, May 2009.

    • Georgios Gousios and Diomidis Spinellis. A platform for software engineering research. In Michael W. Godfrey and Jim Whitehead, editors, MSR '09: Proceedings of the 6th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, 31–40. IEEE, May 2009.

    • Diomidis Spinellis, Georgios Gousios, Vassilios Karakoidas, Panagiotis Louridas, Paul J. Adams, Ioannis Samoladas c, and Ioannis Stamelos. Evaluating the quality of open source software. In SQM 2008: Second International Workshop on Software Quality and Maintainability—12th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 2008) satellite event, 5–28. The Reengineering Forum, April 2008. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science Volume 233 (March 2009).

    • Diomidis Spinellis. A tale of four kernels. In Wilhem Schäfer, Matthew B. Dwyer, and Volker Gruhn, editors, ICSE '08: Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering, 381–390. New York, May 2008. Association for Computing Machinery.

    • Ioannis Samoladas, Georgios Gousios, Diomidis Spinellis, and Ioannis Stamelos. The SQO-OSS quality model: measurement based open source software evaluation. In Ernesto Damiani and Giancarlo Succi, editors, Open Source Development, Communities and Quality — OSS 2008: 4th International Conference on Open Source Systems, 237–248. Boston, September 2008. IFIP 20th World Computer Congress, Working Group 2.3 on Open Source Software, Springer.

    • Georgios Gousios, Eirini Kalliamvakou, and Diomidis Spinellis. Measuring developer contribution from software repository data. In MSR '08: Proceedings of the 2008 International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, 129–132. New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.

    • Dimitris Mitropoulos and Diomidis Spinellis. Countering SQL injection attacks with a database driver. In Theodore S. Papatheodorou, Dimitris N. Christodoulakis, and Nikitas N. Karanikolas, editors, Current Trends in Informatics: 11th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics, PCI 2007, volume B, 105–115. Athens, May 2007. New Technologies Publications.

    • Georgios Gousios, Vassilios Karakoidas, Konstantinos Stroggylos, Panagiotis Louridas, Vasileios Vlachos, and Diomidis Spinellis. Software quality assessment of open source software. In Proceedings of the 11th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics. May 2007.

    • Vasileios Vlachos, Andreas Raptis, and Diomidis Spinellis. Promising steps towards computer hygiene. In Steven Furnell, editor, International Network Conference (INC2006), 229–236. July 2006.

    • Adriaan de Groot, Sebastian Kügler, Paul Adams, and Georgios Gousios. Call for quality: open source software quality observation. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Open Source Systems. June 2006.