The Department of Software Engineering at the University of Szeged, MultiRacio Ltd. and FrontEndART Ltd. recently accomplished a large project called OpenOffice++ for analyzing, improving and monitoring the quality of OpenOffice.org source code by using the SourceInventory tool which is based on the Columbus framework. The project was 26 months long and had a volume of 0.5 million Euros.

This project is now being continued for three years in a larger scale (2,5 million Euros) involving new partners (Sun Microsystems Hungary, Polygon - IBM, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and Eötvös Loránd University).

We develop technologies, tools and a methodology for assessing the quality of the source code. The applied methods include the automatic analysis of source code and the extraction of information from which we calculate various quality indicators with which we rank and certify the product. Our tools continuously scan the source code of OpenOffice.org releases (8 million lines of C++ code) and store the measured values in an SQL database.

The results can be accessed and queried through a web-based interface. Using the extracted information our tools also audit the code to detect bugs and identify design problems. The problematic code fragments are being refactored to obtain better quality code and more than 180 resulting patches were already contributed back to the OpenOffice.org community. It is also possible to apply this quality assessment and monitoring system to software systems developed in other languages (C/C++/C#/Java/SQL).