Open Source Software and Reliability Metrics

Abstract: Open source software during the last decade has got phenomenal success but still people are hesitant in picking up open source products. Various Studies shows that the adoption rate of open source software is very low especially in the countries like India. Reliability and quality of open source software may be the main concern for the most users. Users not only want high reliable software but often desire to check the quantitative estimation of the reliability of the open source product. Reliability metrics are units of measure for system reliability which are used to quantify the reliability of the software product. Various reliability metrics are exists which measures software reliability in various development phases like requirements, Design, coding and testing phases and helps project managers to assess the ongoing project. OSS development methodology is quite distinct and does not have formal document for Requirement, Design, Testing, and so on. Hence these metrics have to be studied on the open source software point of view. In OSS the end-user is also a part of development community and various statistics like number of contributors, number of commits, usage levels in terms of number of users, project behaviour in terms of faults/bugs reports and fixing time source line of code etc. are publicly available through the repository sites. Therefore the quality and reliability of the OSS code needs to be studied on the scale of these parameters. In this paper exploratory study is made on reliability metrics in view of OSS software and proposes a derived metrics based on these repository metrics of OSS. Although reliability is hard to measure but proposed simple derived user oriented matrix facilitate user for quantitative estimation and helps them to take decision on the adoption of OSS software.

Keywords: Open Source Software, Software Metrics, Reliability, Reliability Metrics, OSS Contributors, Source Code, Commits