05/12/2006

The objective of the European project "Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software" (SQO-OSS), which is coordinated by the Athens University of Economics and Business, is the development of tools for quality and the viability assessment of open source software. The project has a total budget of 2.47 million euro, which is co-funded by the 6th E.U. Framework Programme for Research ("Information Society Technology" programme-IST). The Aristotle University of Thessalonica and another four foundations from Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom, which are active in open source projects, also participate in the project.

The project?s objective is, on the one hand, to help European programmers improve the quality of the code they develop and, on the other, to provide scientific documentation on quality and viability. Open source is an important sector for European Small to Medium software development Enterprises (SMEs), therefore advanced tools for the standardisation and certification of code reliability will increase competitiveness on a global scale.

A part of the project is to develop innovative software quality measurement tools which, in combination with data extraction and artificial intelligence methods, will provide complete evaluation results to both programmers and users. In particular, a quality evaluation platform and a complete set of measuring tools will be developed, which will take into consideration quality indicators which are available at open source project repositories as well as a complete version of open source applications with quality classification. The products will be marketed with a BSD licence in order to boost corporate interest.

According to the project?s coordinator, Prof. D. Spinellis, an industry matures when its products are standardised. The objective evaluation of open source projects through SQO-OSS tools is expected to boost recognition of smaller and less known projects.

Source: CORDIS