QA Under The Open Source Development Model

carrowood writes "A survey was conducted questioning open source developers from both large and small projects concerning their quality assurance practices. A research paper based on the survey result was just published in the Journal of Systems and Software. Some comparisions between QA practices of open vs closed source projects are made with some interesting observations. While on the whole it looks like open source QA can be as good as that in traditional software development, there were a few areas pointed out where the open source community does not do so well, such as regression testing and setting release dates. A thought provoking read."

Comments

Release dates?

[mrjb]

Considering the fact that open source software is often not commercial, it doesn't sound strange to me that release dates are not very strict. As there often is no budget, there is no maximum allowed time that may be spent on the feature set. Thus, software is released whenever the planned features have been built in, rather than cutting the desired feature set to fit the release date.