A Survey on How Well-Known Open Source Software Projects Are Tested

Abstract

In this paper, we survey a set of 33 well-known Open Source Software (OSS) projects to understand how in 2010 developers perform quality assurance activities for their OSS projects. We compare our results with the data published in a previous survey done by L. Zhao and S. Elbaum. Our results are in line with the previous work and confirm that OSS is usually not validated enough and therefore its quality is not revealed enough. To simplify the task of quality assurance, the paper suggests the use of a testing framework that can support most of the phases of a well-planned testing activity, and describes the use of Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) to collect and expose dynamic quality attributes of OSS projects.