A Study on Defect Density of Open Source Software

Open source software (OSS) development is considered an effective approach to ensuring acceptable levels of software quality. One facet of quality improvement involves the detection of potential relationship between defect density and other open source software metrics. This paper presents an empirical study of the relationship between defect density and download number, software size and developer number as three popular repository metrics. This relationship is explored by examining forty-four randomly selected open source software projects retrieved from SourceForge.net. By applying simple and multiple linear regression analysis, the results reveal a statistically significant relationship between defect density and number of developers and software size jointly. However, despite theoretical expectations, no significant relationship was found between defect density and number of downloads in OSS projects.