Quality Metrics for OSS Projects
Last week a colleague asked about software quality metrics for Operational Support System (OSS) projects. A large telecommunications provider was complaining that the system that they had delivered contained too many bugs. The question that she needed answered was "How many bugs is too many?". In answer to this question she wanted some benchmarks for industry best practice in terms of bugs per lines of code (LOC).
Before examining this question, we thought we should look at some of the characteristics of OSS projects, including:
- Typically they are large in terms of code base and time to deliver;
- They are complex;
- They are highly customised;
- They are expensive and;
- They deliver strategic benefits to the service provider.
In situations such as these we start by looking at the customer's real concerns - there is usually an underlying problem that elicits the response "Your system contains too many bugs". Here is a quick checklist:
- Is the system intent correct - that is, were the initial requirements accurate?;
- When bugs are identified, can the customer report and track them online?;
- Are any of the bugs fundamentally hampering the service provider's ability to achieve their strategic objectives? and;
- Is the process to manage bugs satisfactory from the customer's perspective?
In this instance, the problem was with the last point above. When the customer raised a bug (which they could do online), the systems integrator (SI) would identify and triage the bug, request a fix from the OSS vendor and then implement the patch. This took time and although OSS vendor was not charging for bug fixes the SI was charging for their time to report the bug and implement the fix. This was the source of the customer's dissatisfaction.
So benchmarking themselves based on metrics such as bugs per LOC would have been useless. Instead, we recommended an approach that we had used on a previous project experiencing similar difficulties. The SI and OSS vendor would agree to share the cost of each bug fix and not pass these costs on to the customer. The result:
- The customer saw an immediate improvement in responsiveness from the SI;
- Fixes for their two critical bugs were implemented within in two weeks;
- The customer was happy for their remaining 16 bugs to be resolved within a timeframe spanning 3 months.
The lesson here is that the solution to achieving a quality result may not depend so much on technical issues as organisational and management ones.
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