One of the goals of our research on software quality and security is to define a baseline so that people can measure software reliability in both open-source and proprietary software projects.

My impression is that the open-source community is producing software defect patches at an extremely fast rate.

The results that we have discovered mark a great first step in automatically assessing the quality and security of any given code base. However, our goal is not only to measure quality and security, but to make the projects that we analyze better. By opening up our analysis results to the core developers of these open source projects, we hope to work with them to reduce the number of defects and vulnerabilities in their code bases.

This is really a great way to reach out to a new community that develops software in a completely different way than commercial software.

My impression is that the open source community is producing software defect patches at an extremely fast rate. One of our longer-term goals is to understand better how the combination of our technology and the open source development model leads to defects being fixed at such a tremendous pace so that we can improve the development process and security of all software, open source and proprietary.

One of the goals of our research on software quality and security is to define a baseline so that people can measure software reliability in both open source and proprietary software projects. No technology can find all bugs in software, but we have collected a critical mass of data through an automated and repeatable analysis framework to show how software quality can be concretely assessed, compared, and ultimately improved.