Open source software (OSS) solutions provide mission- critical services to industry and government organizations. However, empirical studies on OSS development practices raise concerns on risky practices such as unclear require- ment elicitation, ad hoc development process, little atten- tion to quality assurance (QA) and documentation, and poor project management. Event then the ability to pro- duce high quality products in such an environment may seem surprising and thus warrants an investigation on ef- fective QA mechanism in OSS projects. This paper pro- vides a preliminary exploration to improve our understand- ing of software quality practices in different types of OSS projects. We propose a framework of QA in an OSS project, elicit OSS stakeholder value propositions for QA, and de- rive performance indicators. For an initial empirical eval- uation we applied these indicators to 5 releases of 2 large Apache projects (Tomcat and MyFaces) to analyze the ex- tent to which QA aspects are commonly performed during development process.
Keywords: Open Source Software and Software Quality, Distributed Software Development, Value Based Software Engineering, Product Evolution