The influence of software product quality attributes on open source projects: A characterization study

Several Open Source Software (OSS) projects have adopted frequent releases as a strategy to deliver both new features and fix bugs on time. These entails express requests from the project's community, registered as issues in bug repositories by active users and developers. Each OSS project has its own priorities established by their respective communities. A still open question is to what extent these priorities influence selection of the issues that should be tackled first, implemented/solved and delivered in subsequent releases. In this paper, we present an exploratory study on the influence of target product quality attributes in software release practices of OSS projects. The goal is to search for evidence that clarify the relationships between target attributes, priorities assigned to the registered issues and the ways they are delivered by product releases. To this end, we asked a set of participants to identify these attributes through the data analysis of repositories of three well-known OSS projects: Libre Office, Eclipse and Mozilla Firefox. Evidence provided by the participants suggest that OSS community developers use criteria/priorities driven by specific software product quality attributes to plan and perform software releases.