Model to measure the quality of Free Software

This document was published not long ago by the Department of Processes and Systems at the Simon Bolivar University and the National Telecommunications Commission of Venezuela CONATEL, I heard about this through the network of that country called free geomatics and it really is an interesting inspiration so as to move its cheese to anyone.

The purpose of this paper is to present a set of quality characteristics to assess Free Software applied to GIS under the ISO / IEC 9126 standard and Dromey’s quality model, adapted under a scheme coined as FLY.

The measurement system reviews aspects of functionality, portability and maintainability within four levels of analysis:

1. Dimension (internal aspects contextual to the process, internal and contextual aspects of the product and internal and contextual aspects of the human perspective)

2. Categories. (These are 14 associated with the three dimensions mentioned above)

3. Features

4 Metrics

The issue becomes interesting, as well as the experience itself because out of folklore that exists in Venezuela toward the political commitment to socialism, there is also an interesting move in the open source theme (such as it’s seen the dynamic with gvSIG in distribution lists), and a policy that since 2004 the government bodies gradually migrate to free software. This trend can already be seen in several South American countries that pose a significant cash investment so far dedicated to proprietary software or copyright violation.

I recommend taking a look at the document, because it can be implemented by other countries or institutions. Apart from the introduction and conclusions it is included a context as background, documenting the methodology followed,the proposal of quality model and the case study with its results. Although this document use case was made with Grass, Qgis and Thuban tools, process can be adapted to other alternatives which sin is not to be popular.

Here you can view the general document.

Here you can view the document applied to GIS