Abstract of paper (English)


PDF of paper (English)

"From our model we conclude that open source projects converge always faster to a bug-free state for the same set of parameters, which is precisely the argument of Ref. [8]. This finding clearly indicates that closed-source projects must have enough programmers, good enough ones, and have enough users in order to achieve the same software quality in the same amount of time. On the other hand, the quality of open source project programmers does not need to be as high as those of close source projects in order to achieve the same rate of convergence to bug-free programs."

These authors used a mathematical model, which is described in detail, to model software development. Another interesting conclusion is "...our model shows that software projects can converge to a bug-free state even with imperfect programmers."

- Willy Smith, reporting from Costa Rica