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

Generating Value Through Open Source: Software Service Market Regulation and Licensing Policy

In the software industry, commercial open-source software vendors have recognized that providing services to help businesses derive greater value in the implementation of open source–based systems can be a profitable business model. Moreover, society may greatly benefit when software originators choose an open-source development strategy as their products become widely available, readily customizable, and open to community contributions. In this study, we present an economic model to study how software licensing attributes affect a software originator’s decisions, aiming to provide policy makers with insights into how welfare-improving, open-source outcomes can be incentivized. We show that when a competing contributor is apt at reaping the benefits of software development investment, a less restrictive open source license (e.g., Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD style) can improve welfare. On the other hand, when the originator is better at leveraging investment and service costs are high, a more restrictive license (e.g., General Public License, or GPL style) can be best for social welfare even when a contributor can cost-efficiently develop the software. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2017.0726

The non-market benefits of rural service provision

The provision of services in rural areas is constrained by a number of issues arising from the remoteness of such areas and the relative sparsity of rural populations. These factors combine to increase the cost of supply and reduce the demand for services, which consequently threatens the viability of service provision whether by the public or private sectors. A possible to solution to these issues lies in the co-location of rural services, which in general means that two or more distinct services are located within the same premises thus reducing the delivery costs associated with one or more of these services. Beyond the simple economics of service provision lies the existence of nonmarket elements of services in terms of benefits to local communities of service provision that might arise from the social elements of local provided services such as community cohesion. This paper applies non-market valuation to quantify these benefits in three case studies across Scotland. The results indicate that relative degree of these benefits can be related to the remoteness of rural communities in that more remote communities particularly value the community aspects of services whereas less remote communities are more resistant to increased distances to access services. More generally, the results provide evidence on the inherent trade-offs between factors such as opening hours, levels of service and distance that can be used in determining the optimal configuration of service provision.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Community Collaboration and Venture Capital Finance

Do entrepreneurial ventures that adopt open business model (i.e., ?Open source?) obtain a different quality of VC financing, and receive a different level of VC governance and monitoring post investment? We conduct the analysis on a sample of 514 software entrepreneurial ventures that received VC funding in 6,555 different deals extracted from VentureXpert. The data indicate entrepreneurial ventures with open business model receive funding from VCs that are more highly industry-specialized; more experienced, had greater IPO success, raised more capital and are more connected in syndication network. Also, they are monitored more intensively through more frequent staged investment rounds

Sustainable and participatory forestry under Mediterranean conditions: criteria and indicators for monitoring in a forest management unit of Comunidad Valenciana (Spain)

Tesis por compendioSustainable forest management (SFM) considers the social and ecological aspects of forestry apart from the productive ones. However, the relative importance of its principles changes in each type of forest. Criteria and indicators (C&I) extend the knowledge and understanding of SFM in each different situation. A set of C&I to be applied under Mediterranean conditions is proposed in this thesis. The scope was set for the forest management unit (FMU). The C&I proposed took into account the Spanish context and the Forestry Regional Plan for the region of Valencia (whose Spanish acronym is PATFOR) served as a reference. The thesis is made of three papers, two of them published and one accepted. The first identified the requirements of SFM under Mediterranean conditions and analysed the Spanish situation. For that purpose, a strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats (SWOT) analysis was carried out and strategies for improvement were determined. The results of the SWOT analysis together with the strategies and the requirements identified by means of literature review were verified in a questionnaire sent to experts. In the second paper, a group of criteria recommended to take into account for the success of a participatory process were established. A review of case studies which had developed decision support systems (DSSs) including elements of participation was completed. Conslusions were considered for the method applied in the third paper and they helped to identify indicators for the criterion “participatory processes”, which is one of the criteria proposed in this thesis. Besides, PATFOR recommends including participation in forestry decision-making. The third paper started adaptating various ecosystem services frameworks to Mediterranean conditions. PATFOR suggests that forestry is more sustainable if it stems from the provision of ecosystem services, even more in Mediterranean forests because they are not very productive in general. Management criteria which maintain and improve the provision of ecosystem services were identified. A participatory process took place in Ayora (a village in the region of Valencia); participants were asked to rank the criteria identified according their management preferences for La Hunde y La Palomera, a FMU near the village. A proposal of indicators was another output of this paper. The thesis includes another chapter which does not correspond to any published paper; it describes the elaboration of a questionnaire that was sent to experts. The questionnaire asked respondents to prioritise the indicators proposed in the third paper following the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology. The result is a proposal of 15 criteria and 90 indicators. Criteria were inspired by the requirements of the first paper and the ecosystem services. 7 out of 15 criteria are social, noticeably increasing the weight of the social pillar in comparison with other existing C&I sets. Nevertheless, participants ranked ecological implications of forestry as the most preferred ones. However, they did not reject any of the criteria and this suggests that considering ecosystem services in forest management is realistic and desirable. Although the AHP questionnaire sent to experts was different from the participatory process, both in appearance and content, some comparisons can be made. Experts search for feasibility in their answers. It may be recommended from these differences that forestry decision-making takes into account the views of affected people, but their preferences might pass an expert filter before carrying out actions. Regarding the indicators, some more work on them is still necessary, but they show a simple writing and they refer to a specific aspect of each criterion.Valls Donderis, P. (2015). Sustainable and participatory forestry under Mediterranean conditions: criteria and indicators for monitoring in a forest management unit of Comunidad Valenciana (Spain) [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/48540TESISCompendi

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Market valuation of strategic responses to open source news and announcements

This paper examines the disruptive impact that open source (OS) software has on the mainstream software market within the period 2001 - 2003. The findings indicate that the stock market reacted negatively when the strategic responses of closed source incumbents were antagonistic to open source despite their relentless effort and investment in product and service enhancement. Whereas their counterparts that embraced open source were most likely to perform well on the stock market and successfully enter into the emerging new markets

Incentivizing Stable Path Selection in Future Internet Architectures

By delegating path control to end-hosts, future Internet architectures offer flexibility for path selection. However, there is a concern that the distributed routing decisions by end-hosts, in particular load-adaptive routing, can lead to oscillations if path selection is performed without coordination or accurate load information. Prior research has addressed this problem by devising path-selection policies that lead to stability. However, little is known about the viability of these policies in the Internet context, where selfish end-hosts can deviate from a prescribed policy if such a deviation is beneficial fromtheir individual perspective. In order to achieve network stability in future Internet architectures, it is essential that end-hosts have an incentive to adopt a stability-oriented path-selection policy. In this work, we perform the first incentive analysis of the stability-inducing path-selection policies proposed in the literature. Building on a game-theoretic model of end-host path selection, we show that these policies are in fact incompatible with the self-interest of end-hosts, as these strategies make it worthwhile to pursue an oscillatory path-selection strategy. Therefore, stability in networks with selfish end-hosts must be enforced by incentive-compatible mechanisms. We present two such mechanisms and formally prove their incentive compatibility.Comment: 38th International Symposium on Computer Performance, Modeling, Measurements and Evaluation (PERFORMANCE 2020