It is a widely held belief that Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)
development leads to the creation of software with the same, if not higher
quality compared to that created using proprietary software development
models. However there is little research on evaluating the quality of FOSS
code, and the impact of project characteristics such as age, number of core
developers, code-base size, etc. In this exploratory study, we examined 110
FOSS projects, measuring the quality of the code and architectural design
using code smells. We found that, contrary to our expectations, the overall
quality of the code is not affected by the size of the code base, but that it was
negatively impacted by the growth of the number code contributors. Our
results also show that projects with more core developers don’t necessarily
have better code quality.
