Trustworthiness Evaluation and Testing of Open Source Components

The use of Open Source Components (OSCs) is rapidly increasing in software systems. One of the biggest obstacles for the use of OSCs is the fact that the software integrators can not be sure of the quality of the components. Thus, it is the responsibility of the integrators to perform the quality evaluation. When building products using OSCs, the integrators should have a clear method and tools that facilitate and automate the evaluation work. Our contribution is a method and tooling for trustworthiness evaluation and testing of OSCs. The method provides clear guidelines to assist the integrators to perform the evaluation in their own software development environment. The tooling assists in the technical trustworthiness evaluation, containing tools for reliability analysis and testing. The tools are independent, co-operating in the open source context.