Towards Automated Quality Models for Software Development Communities: The QualOSS and FLOSSMetrics Case

Quality models for software products and processes help both to developers and users to better understand their characteristics. In the specific case of libre (free, open source) software, the availability of a mature and reliable development community is an important factor to be considered, since in most cases both the evolvability and future fitness of the product depends on it. Up to now, most of the quality models for communities have been based on the manual examination by experts, which is time-consuming, generally inconsistent and often error-prone. In this paper, we propose a methodology, and some examples of how it works in practice, of how a quality model for development communities can be automated. The quality model used is a part of the QualOSS quality model, while the metrics are those collected by the FLOSSMetrics project.