An Approach to Establish a Software Reliability Model for Different Free and Open Source Software Development Paradigms

In the modern software development world, the two universally accepted and followed ways of software development are proprietary and open source. Both these two different software development types have one very crucial element in common: the success of the end product. Even though the business success of open source can be judged in terms of profit or loss, the developed software and the project itself are subject to criteria such as reliability, maintainability and security as success indicators. A software project and the developed software can be called reliable if the end product can satisfy the requirements of metrics measuring these criteria. In this thesis work, different reliability models and current proposed metrics for OSS development are studied in order to establish a software reliability model for Free and Open Source Software development. Based on the literature review, different reliability models and metrics are compared and contrasted and a classification of different open source paradigms is presented. These findings are also analyzed and verified on different case studies on Open Source Software reliability evaluation. Asiasanat:open source, free and open source software, reliability, reliability metrics, reliability model