Open Source Software: Leveraging Software Quality in the Industrial Context

For years, the software industry has been suffering from problems subsumed under the term “software crisis”. While traditional development methods were not able to provide a cure, open source software (OSS) seems to be an effective approach to reduce product cycle-times and decrease development costs. Moreover, OSS has great potential to achieve high software quality and promote creation of reusable software, provided that proper organization and infrastructure are in place. In this paper, we look at different facets of software quality, and analyze possibilities and limitations of OSS methodology regarding the achievement of certain quality levels. We further consider different forms of cooperation between enterprises and OSS communities and examine the prerequisites for successful adoption of OSS methodology. We come to the conclusion that to benefit from the advantages of OSS, enterprises have to adapt their internal organization and establish a development style that is less formally organized and more strongly based on self-organization principles.