Reliability modeling of freely-available Internet-distributed software

A wealth of freely-available software is available on the Internet; however, developers are wary of its reuse because it is assumed to be of poor quality. Reliability is one way that software quality can be measured, but it requires metrics data that are typically not maintained for freely-available software. A technique is presented which allows reliability data to be extracted from available data, and is validated by showing that the data can be used to fit a logarithmic reliability model. By modeling the reliability, estimates of overall quality, remaining faults, and release times can be predicted for the software