Customer reviews as the measure of software quality

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) has become ubiquitous nowadays. It is crucial for the OSS project managers as well as developers to understand users' perception of quality to remain consistent with producing good quality software. To understand users' point of view, like many studies in the commercial product/service sectors which rely upon customer reviews to understand customer behaviour, the authors' main focus is to analyse user ratings and reviews of OSS projects that may represent user satisfaction for that particular software application. We have analysed 41,428 customer reviews (obtained from SourceForge.net) of 886 most popular OSS projects belonging to a specific domain and programming language. The results indicate that overall user ratings and reviews of the popular OSS projects contain a very positive sentiment and more frequent occurrence of emotions like joy, anticipation, and trust as compared to disgust, fear, and surprise. Further, we have examined that the affectiveness of customer reviews with respect to OSS popularity and quality aspects along with their programming languages and problem domains. The results show a stronger association of review affectiveness with the number of reviews than with the number of downloads of the OSS projects, and more downloads do not mean more reviews.

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