European consortium releases Open Source quality assessment platform

The European Commission supported Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software (SQO-OSS) project has announced the release of its software quality checking platform, Alitheia Core.

Developed by a consortium of European businesses, academics and open source software projects, the new application will analyse the product quality of open source software projects and assess the true potential of the development communities around them.

A demonstration of the system is available at the Alitheia Core demo server, where users will be able to see the system as run against a selection of different open source software projects.

As the Alitheia Core matures it will allow open source software projects to deploy the system for themselves to monitor their own code quality.

Alitheia Core's current features include:
- System administration allowing the installation of new project data
- Metrics: lines of code count, lines of comments count and a cross-language metrics tool
- A web-based user interface for the display of calculation results

This release should be considered a usable alpha release; whilst core functionality is provided, performance issues remain and customisation is currently disabled. The Alitheia Core is released under the 2-clause BSD license.

The Alitheia Core source code may be obtained from the project's SVN server or a pre-compiled package of the source can be obtained. Distribution-specific packages for Linux users will be available for Alitheia Core in forthcoming releases.

The SQO-OSS project is always looking for new contributors. Currently its focus is on extending the portfolio of metric plug-ins available to the system. All contributions (bug reports/fixes, code, etc.) are all gratefully received.

Professor Diomidis Spinellis, Project Coordinator said: “This release opens up SQO-OSS to the scrutiny of the open source software developers and users community. It demonstrates SQO-OSS's commitment to the deployment of a practical working system.”

ABOUT SQO-OSS
SQO-OSS is a community-based project dedicated to checking the quality of Free and Open Source software and making its data publicly available. It's founding partners are the Athens University of Economics and Business, the Aristotle University Of Thessalniki, Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, KDE e.V., ProSyst Software GMBH and Sirius Corporation plc. For more information visit the SQO-OSS community website.

CONTACT
For further information please contact:
- Diomidis Spinellis, Project Coordinator, dds@aueb.gr
- Giorgos Gousios, Project Manager, gousiosg@aueb.gr