Open Source EU Funded Projects: FLOSSMetrics

Looking into EU funded open source initiatives I stepped into few projects, included EDOS,  QualOSS and few others around FLOSS metrics and quality. Over the last 7 years a number of open source software assessment methodologies have been proposed, and FLOSSMetrics definitely achieved some interesting results in this respect, and not only.

Beyond its academic merits the FLOSSMetrics final report provides some useful tools to help industry players as well as public administrations to perform quality assessment and software selection in the open source domain.

FLOSSMetrics developed:

  • a repository finder (code name: Octopus) that automatically retrieves all the relevant data sources for a given project;
  • a retrieval system that automates the retrieval and partially analysis of data from public repositories;
  • a database to store the results of analyses;
  • a tool to analyze bug-tracking activity (code name: Bicho);
  • last but not least a web interface to the data provided by the project (code name: Melquiades).

The high-level studies deliverable – reporting some examples of how the data collected by FLOSSMetrics can be used for research studies – shows how data collected from source code management systems, mailing-lists and issue tracking systems can be effectively used.

FLOSSMetrics having analyzed over 2600 projects and making its results available also through APIs, is one of the most interesting open source related projects eu-funded (spending less than 600,000 euros in 3 years!).

Kudos to the project coordinator Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona and his team!

About FLOSSMetrics tools.
The FLOSSMetrics infrastructure is available public under GPL license and included into the libresoft-tools package.

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