Quality management in open source projects - experiences from the open ecard project

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) has immensely increased in popularity over the years and it is well known, that software with public access to the sources is on average less error prone than closed source software, especially if the project is supported by a large community which peer reviews the sources [Kua02]. For new and smaller projects however there is no large community yet and hence achieving and maintaining sufficient product quality is challenging. Against this background the present paper discusses aspects of product quality management for OSS in general and shares the experiences gathered in the Open eCard project, which has developed an ISO/IEC 24727 based eID client.