OSS integration issues and community support: an integrator perspective

The reuse and integration of Open Source Software (OSS) components provided by OSS communities is becoming an economical and strategic need for today’s organizations. The integration of OSS components provides many benefits, but also risks and challenges. One of the most important risks is the lack of effective and timely OSS community support for dealing with possible integration problems. For gaining an understanding of the common problems that organizations face when integrating OSS components, and the role played by OSS communities, we performed an exploratory study on 25 OSS integration projects from different European organizations. The results show that the main way of reducing integration problems was the use of OSS components from well-established communities; therefore very few integration problems were identified. In most of the cases these problems were successfully solved with the support from the OSS community and/or colleagues. In addition, contrary to the common belief that understanding code from someone else is a hard and undesirable task, some integrators consider OSS code even more understandable than their own code.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Usage of Open Source in Commercial Software Product Development - Findings from a Focus Group Meeting

Open source components can be used as one type of software component in development of commercial software. In development using this type of component, potential open source components must first be identified, then specific components must be selected, and after that selected components should maybe be adapted before they are included in the developed product. A company using open source components must also decide how they should participate in open source project from which they use software. These steps have been investigated in a focus group meeting with representatives from industry. Findings, in the form of recommendations to engineers in the field are summarized for all the mentioned phases. The findings have been compared to published literature, and no major differences or conflicting facts have been found

IDENTIFICATION AND QUANTIFICATION OF VARIABILITY MEASURES AFFECTING CODE REUSABILITY IN OPEN SOURCE ENVIRONMENT

Open source software (OSS) is one of the emerging areas in software engineering, and is gaining the interest of the software development community. OSS was started as a movement, and for many years software developers contributed to it as their hobby (non commercial purpose). Now, OSS components are being reused in CBSD (commercial purpose). However, recently, the use of OSS in SPL is envisioned recently by software engineering researchers, thus bringing it into a new arena. Being an emerging research area, it demands exploratory study to explore the dimensions of this phenomenon. Furthermore, there is a need to assess the reusability of OSS which is the focal point of these disciplines (CBSE, SPL, and OSS). In this research, a mixed method based approach is employed which is specifically 'partially mixed sequential dominant study'. It involves both qualitative (interviews) and quantitative phases (survey and experiment). During the qualitative phase seven respondents were involved, sample size of survey was 396, and three experiments were conducted. The main contribution of this study is results of exploration of the phenomenon 'reuse of OSS in reuse intensive software development'. The findings include 7 categories and 39 dimensions. One of the dimension factors affecting reusability was carried to the quantitative phase (survey and experiment). On basis of the findings, proposal for reusability attribute model was presented at class and package level. Variability is one of the newly identified attribute of reusability. A comprehensive theoretical analysis of variability implementation mechanisms is conducted to propose metrics for its assessment. The reusability attribute model is validated by statistical analysis of I 03 classes and 77 packages. An evolutionary reusability analysis of two open source software was conducted, where different versions of software are analyzed for their reusability. The results show a positive correlation between variability and reusability at package level and validate the other identified attributes. The results would be helpful to conduct further studies in this area

IDENTIFICATION AND QUANTIFICATION OF VARIABILITY MEASURES AFFECTING CODE REUSABILITY IN OPEN SOURCE ENVIRONMENT

Open source software (OSS) is one of the emerging areas in software engineering, and is gaining the interest of the software development community. OSS was started as a movement, and for many years software developers contributed to it as their hobby (non commercial purpose). Now, OSS components are being reused in CBSD (commercial purpose). However, recently, the use of OSS in SPL is envisioned recently by software engineering researchers, thus bringing it into a new arena. Being an emerging research area, it demands exploratory study to explore the dimensions of this phenomenon. Furthermore, there is a need to assess the reusability of OSS which is the focal point of these disciplines (CBSE, SPL, and OSS). In this research, a mixed method based approach is employed which is specifically 'partially mixed sequential dominant study'. It involves both qualitative (interviews) and quantitative phases (survey and experiment). During the qualitative phase seven respondents were involved, sample size of survey was 396, and three experiments were conducted. The main contribution of this study is results of exploration of the phenomenon 'reuse of OSS in reuse intensive software development'. The findings include 7 categories and 39 dimensions. One of the dimension factors affecting reusability was carried to the quantitative phase (survey and experiment). On basis of the findings, proposal for reusability attribute model was presented at class and package level. Variability is one of the newly identified attribute of reusability. A comprehensive theoretical analysis of variability implementation mechanisms is conducted to propose metrics for its assessment. The reusability attribute model is validated by statistical analysis of I 03 classes and 77 packages. An evolutionary reusability analysis of two open source software was conducted, where different versions of software are analyzed for their reusability. The results show a positive correlation between variability and reusability at package level and validate the other identified attributes. The results would be helpful to conduct further studies in this area