Free and Open Source Software Quality Assurance

During the past two decades, the free and open source software community has been developing high quality software that proved to be a serious rival to proprietary software produced by commercial companies. However, in spite of its considerable success within the developers' community, F/OSS did not attract many enthusiasts from outside this community. Claims against the adoption of F/OSS are usually rooted in the apparent lack of quality assurance mechanisms required to guarantee the protection of users' interests. The objective of this study is to promote higher adoption of F/OSS artefacts outside the developers' community by exploring possibilities to provide appropriate assurances that F/OSS artefacts will meet the quality levels expected by users