Creative Commons

This dissertation was written as a part of the MSc in ICT Systems at the International Hellenic University. Open source applications are used in a wide variety of organizations nowadays. The development model of free license software is widely adopted by the industry. The diversity of the open source software systems raises the demands for quality software by the users. Quality can be achieved today with the use of quality assurance tools during the development. The question though is how an open source application that is created by the collaborative effort of several developers can meet certain quality criteria posed by such tools. To get an answer to that we partially developed the well-known in health sector OpenEMR software system for the needs of the Social Infirmary of the Thessaloniki and then tested it with the use of PHP_Depend quality assurance tool. The purpose is to find how a large open source program, with several lines of code written by different programmers, is behaving in terms of consistency, scalability and Object-Oriented structure. The results are encouraging showing that open source applications can be qualitative and worth to be considered when it comes to choose what software to use. At this point I need to express my gratitude to the Associate Professor Ioannis Stamelos under whose guidance and supervision this thesis project was accomplished. Special thanks should be given to the GreekLUG community as well for their help and support with the installment of the OpenEMR in the Social Infirmary of Thessaloniki.