Looking back at the open source process it seems that structural code quality could be established as one of the project goals, defined as a set of structural measures and good programming rules. There are three distinct key practices that may help in achieving high quality code:
1 the programmers could be asked to take into account structural code quality when intervening in the code.
2 the project co-ordinator could assess the quality of the code returned by the programmers according to a predefined standard. This implies that certain components, non-conformant to the standard, may be rejected even if they provide correct bug fixes or new functionality.
3 the project co-ordinator could take appropriate code re-engineering decisions whenever the project seems to experience severe problems.