A Comparison of the Reliability Growth of Open Source and In-House Software

As commercial developers have established processes to assure software quality, open source software depends largely on community usage and defect reporting to achieve some level of quality. Thus, quality of open source software may vary. We examined defects reported in two active and popular open source software projects and an in-house project. The results of this analysis indicate that the reliability growth of each is quite distinct and that the defect profile of open source software appears to be a consequence of the open source software development method itself.