Selection of third party software in Off-The-Shelf-based software development: an interview study with industrial practitioners

The success of software development using third party components highly depends on the ability to select a suitable component for the intended application. The evidence shows that there is limited knowledge about current industrial OTS selection practices. As a result, there is often a gap between theory and practice, and the proposed methods for supporting selection are rarely adopted in the industrial practice. This paper's goal is to investigate the actual industrial practice of component selection in order to provide an initial empirical basis that allows the reconciliation of research and industrial endeavors. The study consisted of semi-structured interviews with 23 employees from 20 different software-intensive companies that mostly develop web information system applications. It provides qualitative information that help to further understand these practices, and emphasize some aspects that have been overlooked by researchers. For instance, although the literature claims that component repositories are important for locating reusable components; these are hardly used in industrial practice. Instead, other resources that have not received considerable attention are used with this aim. Practices and potential market niches for software-intensive companies have been also identified. The results are valuable from both the research and the industrial perspectives as they provide a basis for formulating well-substantiated hypotheses and more effective improvement strategies.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

An open source software selection process and a case study

In this study, I design an empirical open source software selection process, which reuses some ideas from Commercial Off-the-Shelf selection methods and addresses the characteristics of the open source software. Basically, it consists of three basic steps: identification, screening and evaluation. The identification step is to find all possible alternatives to open source software that can meet the high level requirements. The next step is screening, in which the refined requirements are applied to filter the alternatives. The evaluation step is based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process, in which the alternatives are inspected from functional suitability, source code, support strength and popularity. In more detail, under functionality suitability criterion, alternatives to open source software are evaluated in viewing of how much functionality can fit in with the functional user requirements. The source code of the alternatives is evaluated from six criteria: programming language, code size, code comment, code intra-module complexity and code inter-module complexity. The evaluation of support strength depends on the evaluation of field support and support resources. The field support includes commercial support and community support. The community support specifically refers to the direct responses from the community to the support requests. Aside from field support, open source software projects also provide various support-related resources such as, documents, wiki, blog, etc. To determine the popularity of the alternatives, I evaluate them from software use, development participation and web popularity. In the case study, I utilize the process to select the best open source unified modeling language tool from the ten alternatives for the software development process. After the screening phase, the four competitive alternatives, BOUML, ArgoUML, UMLet and Violet, are evaluated from functionality, source code, support strength and popularity criteria. The evaluation result indicates that ArgoUML is the best tool for the requirement. The case study demonstrates the effectiveness of the selection process. Various important attributes of open source software are taken into consideration systematically and the final decision is reached based on comprehensive investigation and analysis. The process provides an operable solution to the open source selection problem in practice

Using multiple criteria decision analysis to aid the selection of enterprise resource planning software : a case study

BHC Ltd is a family owned SME which specialises in steel fabrication for the construction industry. Due to rapid growth over the past decade the company’s current business software has evolved from a collection of semi-integrated individual packages and Excel spreadsheets. To help the company become more efficient during the current financial downturn and to ensure they are capable of future growth, BHC Ltd initiated a project with the University of Strathclyde to select and implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. This paper will provide a case study of BHC’s ERP selection process. In particular it will discuss how steel specific business requirements and organisational culture led us to use multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) when making a final software selection. The MCDA process that was followed is further discussed and includes the success that was achieved by using this approach

Open Source or Off-the-Shelf?:Establishing an institutional repository for a small institution

Effective management of digital assets as well as increasing research exposure and impact are particular challenges faced by smaller institutions with limited infrastructure and resources. The paper explores the significant factors involved in considering, planning and establishing an institutional repository for Bond University, one of the smaller higher education providers in Australia. The salient benefits and advantages as well as the disadvantages of implementing an off-the-shelf product as opposed to an open source solution for an institutional repository are compared. The rationale for choosing a proprietary product over an open source solution is discussed, as well as the process for obtaining funding and the support of key stakeholders within the University. The paper describes the strategies employed to populate the repository retrospectively and to train academic staff and researchers in self-archiving. The development of policy governing the repository and intellectual property and copyright implications are also covered. Background on Bond Universit

Uncertainty explicit assessment of off-the-shelf software: A Bayesian approach

Assessment of software COTS components is an essential part of component-based software development. Poorly chosen components may lead to solutions of low quality and that are difficult to maintain. The assessment may be based on incomplete knowledge about the COTS component itself and other aspects (e.g. vendor’s credentials, etc.), which may affect the decision of selecting COTS component(s). We argue in favor of assessment methods in which uncertainty is explicitly represented (‘uncertainty explicit’ methods) using probability distributions. We provide details of a Bayesian model, which can be used to capture the uncertainties in the simultaneous assessment of two attributes, thus, also capturing the dependencies that might exist between them. We also provide empirical data from the use of this method for the assessment of off-the-shelf database servers which illustrate the advantages of ‘uncertainty explicit’ methods over conventional methods of COTS component assessment which assume that at the end of the assessment the values of the attributes become known with certainty

Open source collaboration for fostering off-the-shelf components selection

The use of Off-The-Shelf software components in Component- Based Development implies many challenges. One of them is the lack of available and well-suited data to support selection of suitable OTS components. This paper proposes a feasible and incremental way to federate and reuse the different efforts for finding, selecting, and maintaining OTS components in a structured way. This is done not only for supporting OTS components selection, but also to overcome reported problems with the integration and maintenance of component repositories. It is based on the “open source collaboration” idea to incrementally build an OTS components reuse infrastructure, enabling automatic support for OTS selection processes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Successful acquisition of IT systems

School of Managemen

Construction of a taxonomy for requirements engineering commercial-off-the-shelf components

This article presents a procedure for constructing a taxonomy of COTS products in the field of Requirements Engineering (RE). The taxonomy and the obtained information reach transcendental benefits to the selection of systems and tools that aid to RE-related actors to simplify and facilitate their work. This taxonomy is performed by means of a goal-oriented methodology inspired in GBRAM (Goal-Based Requirements Analysis Method), called GBTCM (Goal-Based Taxonomy Construction Method), that provides a guide to analyze sources of information and modeling requirements and domains, as well as gathering and organizing the knowledge in any segment of the COTS market. GBTCM claims to promote the use of standards and the reuse of requirements in order to support different processes of selection and integration of components.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version