Open Source EU Funded Projects: SQO-OSS

Among open source related projects funded under the sixth Framework Program, at least four of them – namely FLOSSMetrics, QualiPSo, QUALOSS and SQO-OSS – have been found overlapping around open source software development and quality.

SQO-OSS – Source Quality Observatory for Open Source Software – similarly to FLOSSMetrics was aimed at massive collection of data from thousands of projects, though with different goals.

Accounting to what is reported in SQO-OSS Description of Work was supposed to deliver the following:

  • A plug-in based quality assessment platform, featuring a web and an IDE front-end (code name: Alitheia).
  • 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.

Actually going through all projects’ deliverables the most tangible result seems Alitheia core, the platform for the automated objective evaluation of the quality of open source projects. Unfortunately the majority of users scenarios have not been implemented, and project’s academic findings are hardly of any practical value to increase the competitiveness of European software development SMEs (as originally planned in the DoW).

Despite over 700 projects’s data have been imported, the Alitheia demo website is not available anymore and basically the project failed to provide any visibility to smaller and less known projects, as auspicated by the Project coordinator.

The project was awarded with €1.6 million, and it is now over. The good news is that apparently part of the team is still developing Alitheia core, and A RESTful service offering access to the core metadata might be available sometime this winter.

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