  Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) are based on underlying
assumptions which make them typically more suited for quality evaluation of
closed-source projects and their development lifecycles. Their usage in
open-source software (OSS) projects is a subject of debate. Although the
studies investigating the SRGMs applicability in OSS context do exist, they are
limited by the number of models and projects considered which might lead to
inconclusive results. In this paper, we present an experimental study of SRGMs
applicability to a total of 88 OSS projects, comparing nine SRGMs, looking at
the stability of the best models on the whole projects, on releases, on
different domains, and according to different projects' attributes. With the
aid of the STRAIT tool, we automated repository mining, data processing, and
SRGM analysis for better reproducibility. Overall, we found good applicability
of SRGMs to OSS, but with different performance when segmenting the dataset
into releases and domains, highlighting the difficulty in generalizing the
findings and in the search for one-fits-all models.
