Using antipatterns to improve the quality of FLOSS development

Abstract

Antipatterns have been mostly reported in closed source software environments. With the advent of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), researchers have started analysing popular FLOSS projects, seeking vitality indicators and success patterns.  However, an impressively high percentage of FLOSS projects are unsuccessful.  Moreover, even in the successful cases of FLOSS there can be found tracks of failed attempts, dead-ends, forks, abandonments etc.  FLOSS antipatterns can help developers to improve their code and improve the communication and collaboration within the FLOSS community.  In this paper, we present some example of FLOSS antipatterns and discuss the benefits that they bring to various FLOSS user roles.  Furthermore, we present ontology-based technology and software tools that can be used to assist FLOSS developers and community users to identify, document, share antipatterns and use these mechanisms to assist FLOSS projects conform to specified requirements.  Finally, we propose a framework for the quantitative identification of the antipatterns to use as quality indicators in the certification of FLOSS products.