Exploring the Quality of Free/Open Source Software: a Case Study on an ERP/CRM System

Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) is an alternative way of software development. Software is produced by a community of volunteer developers over the Internet, its source code is available to everyone and can be freely used, modified and distributed at no cost. Maintainability is considered the most important quality factor for such type of software. Recently, F/OSS ERP/CRM products have appeared, and an increasing number of installations is observed worldwide. Proponents of F/OSS claim that their software quality is better than proprietary software quality. Various empirical studies have been conducted to examine these claims, but no study has considered F/OSS products in the ERP/CRM field up to now. This paper presents an analysis of the source code of Compiere, the most successful F/OSS ERP/CRM system written in Java, producing an appraisal of its quality, using a predefined quality model. The internal quality attributes examined are stability, analyzability, testability and changeability. By observing the values of these attributes, assumptions about the degree of the maintainability of the system may be obtained. Moreover an analysis based on multi-organizational productivity data, indicates what would be the cost for producing Compiere in close source mode. The findings of the study, provide evidence provide evidence that Compiere has an aboveaverage level of internal quality, leading to a good level of maintainability as well. However, further empirical research is needed to assess the external quality of Compiere (e.g. functionality and usability) 1 Free/Open Source Software F/OSS is relatively a new, alternative, idea of software development in the area of software engineering. The term “open source software” was first coined in 1998 at a meeting of the F/OSS movement pioneers at Palo Alto [2]. A piece of software (i.e. a software product) is F/OSS when its distribution license fulfills the “four freedoms” of F/OSS. To be more precisely, a software can be said that it is F/OSS when the receiver of the software can: