Electronic Communications of the EASST Volume 33 (2010) Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification (OpenCert 2010) Methodologies and Tools for OSS: Current State of the Practice Zulqarnain Hashmi, Siraj A. Shaikh and Naveed Ikram 11 pages Guest Editors: Luis S. Barbosa, Antonio Cerone, Siraj A. Shaikh Managing Editors: Tiziana Margaria, Julia Padberg, Gabriele Taentzer ECEASST Home Page: http://www.easst.org/eceasst/ ISSN 1863-2122 ECEASST Methodologies and Tools for OSS: Current State of the Practice Zulqarnain Hashmi1, Siraj A. Shaikh2 and Naveed Ikram1 1
[email protected],
[email protected] Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Basic and Applied Sciences, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan 2
[email protected] Department of Computing and the Digital Environment, Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom Abstract: Over the years, the Open Source Software (OSS) development has ma- tured and strengthened, building on some established methodologies and tools. An understanding of the current state of the practice, however, is still lacking. This pa- per presents the results of a survey of the OSS developer community with a view to gain insight of peer review, testing and release management practices, along with the current tool sets used for testing, debugging and, build and release management. Such an insight is important to appreciate the obstacles to overcome to introduce cer- tification and more rigour into the development process. It is hoped that the results of this survey will initiate a useful discussion and allow the community to identify further process improvement opportunities for producing better quality software.