Open Source Code Quality Tools: Sonar
During the dev
elopment of SOS Open Source we analyzed over 60 tools to evalute open source software, and among them we came across Sonar. Sonar is an open source software quality management tool dedicated to continuously analyze and measure source code quality, with very active users and developers mailing-lists and over 3000 downloads per month.
SOS Open Source: What else is going on?
A little blog post to tell you more about what we at SOS Open Source are working on this summer.
Here’s what we are working on right now:
- Open Source Project Management tools. STATUS: we are currently developing a prototype for our customer based on our tool of choice (Redmine). We plan to ship the final customized version in September-mid October. We hopefully be able to share our plug-ins and enhancements before the end of October. »
Open Source Survey Tools: LimeSurvey
SOS Open Source last week evaluated LimeSurvey, the PHP open source survey web application to create on line surveys, translated in many languages and downloaded over 485.000 times. »
Open Source Project Management Tools
SOS Open Source has been used to find and select open source web-based project management with issue-tracking and time-tracking tools to manage multiple IT projects, possibly localized in Italian (or at least open for internazionalization and localization).
The pre-selection of project management programs started by focusing on some of the most famous web-based ones, excluding the following (for the following reasons):
- Kforge, Project HQ, ProjectPier because maintained by a small group;
- Collabtive, Feng Project, because too young (less than 3 years old);
Launchpad and Trac were eventually added to the final list of candidates (see below) »
SOS Open Source
SOS Open Source – an automated methodology to find and evaluate open source software – gathers and analyzes data about open source projects, providing a synthetic representation of all selected candidates and also a graphical tool to compare them.
The general lack of information about open source alternatives requires the use of ad-hoc methodologies and tools to fastly identify projects matching set quality goals, focusing functional requirements‘ tests only on the most promising candidates. »
Evaluate Open Source Software
Open Source software selection starts with the creation of a short-list of open source packages, and the very next step is the evaluation of all candidates.
Open source projects are planned, developed and maintained often using accessible Revision Control systems (e.g. Bazaar, CVS, Git, Mercurial or SVN), Collaboration (blogs, forums, IRC channels, mailing-lists and wikis) and Tracking Systems (e.g. bugzilla, GNATS, OTRS, trac). Despite going through them all can be time-consuming, those are the primary source of information to know more about an open source project. »
How to Find Open Source Software
Discovering which open source software do you use maybe an “easy” game to play – using products like OSS Discovery Audit Edition scanning for over 330,000 open source projects to produce a baseline inventory of open source usage or also Krugle Basic providing basic code discovery and code duplication capabilities – but find useful open source packages can be trickier to master. »
Why Open Source Software Selection Matters
Despite open source exponential growth – the number of available open source programs double every 14 months – only a tiny fraction of famous open source projects are backed by vendors. Actually many thousands of open source projects – included those that are considered by ISVs, SIs and solution providers “enterprise ready” – are largely unknown among the general public. »
