OSSMETER Deliverable 3.1 - Report on Domain Analysis of OSS Quality Attributes

Meaningful and effective measurement of quality attributes of Open Source Software (OSS) requires: • Analysis of and insight in the domain of software quality measurement. • Identification of relevant metrics to measure software quality attributes. • A meta-model to store the results of measurement (i.e., facts directly extracted from the source) as well as any metrics that are derived from these measurements. • Calculation of metrics based on the extracted facts. In this deliverable we present: • A brief summary of motivation and challenges for Task 3.1. • Introduction to software quality as described in ISO/IEC 9126-1:2001. • An initial set of requirements for quality attributes in OSSMETER. • A survey of the domain of software quality. • An initial selection of metrics that are relevant for measuring software quality attributes. • A tool survey of existing tools for metric calculation. • A quick overview of the RASCAL meta-programming language that will be used for metric calculation. • A proposal for and illustration of the Metrics Meta-Model (M3), a general framework for representing basic facts as well as derived (computed) metrics. We show how M3 can be ex- tended to represent Java-specific facts and how these facts form the basis for metric computation and visualization. The presented metrics are already useful but are primarily intended as a proof-of-concept of the approach. • An estimation how well the general OSSMETER requirements for WP3 can be satisfied.