OSMF: A framework for OSS process measurement

Abstract

An Open Source Software (OSS) project can be considered as a new type of business entity involving various roles and stakeholders, e.g., project managers, developers, and users, who apply individual methods. The project managers have the responsibility to manage the OSS development in a way that the OSS product can be delivered to the customers in time and with good quality. This responsibility is challenging, because the heterogeneity of the data collected and analyzed from different stakeholders leads to the complexity of efforts of the project managers to measure and manage OSS projects. In this paper, we propose a measurement framework (OSMF) to enable the project managers to collect and analyze process data from OSS projects efficiently. Initial results show that OSMF can help project managers to manage OSS business processes more efficient, hence improve the decision on OSS project quality. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.