Open Source BI Platforms: A Functional and Architectural Comparison

While in the past the BI market was strictly dominated by closed source and commercial tools, the last few years were characterized by the birth of open source solutions: first as single BI tools, and later as complete BI platforms. An Open Source BI platform provides a full spectrum of BI capabilities within a unified system that reduces the overhead for the development and management of each application, and lets the user feel like he/she was using a single BI solution. This paper proposes a comparative evaluation of three different Open Source BI platforms (namely JasperSoft, Pentaho and SpagoBI) aimed at understanding their current features, their future potentialities and their limits when adopted in real projects as well as a basis for research prototyping. Overall we try to understand if the open source phenomenon will be able to become a valid alternative to commercial platforms within the BI context

Evaluating Process Quality Based on Change Request Data – An Empirical Study of the Eclipse Project

Abstract. The information routinely collected in change request management systems contains valuable information for monitoring of the process quality. However this data is currently utilized in a very limited way. This paper presents an empirical study of the process quality in the product portfolio of the Eclipse project. It is based on a systematic approach for the evaluation of process quality characteristics using change request data. Results of the study offer insights into the development process of Eclipse. Moreover the study allows assessing applicability and limitations of the proposed approach for the evaluation of process quality

Applying the submission multiple tier (SMT) matrix to detect impact on developer interest on open source project survivability

© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014. There is a significant relationship between project activity and developer interest on Open Source (OS) projects. Total project activity submission count number can be an indicator for gauging developer interest. The higher the project activity submission of a project is, the larger developer interest in a project. My paper proposed that applying a Submission Multiple Tier (SMT) matrix can detect the impact of developer interest on project activity. Results showed more volume of OS projects with low project activity than high. Activity submission results also showed that developers are more likely to review than correct projects, with the first priority to find and fix bugs. Further research is needed to determine the impact of project activity type on developer motivation to contribute, participate and support OS projects

Is it all lost? A study of inactive open source projects

Open Source Software (OSS) proponents suggest that when developers lose interest in their project, their last duty is to “hand it off to a competent successor.” However, the mechanisms of such a hand-off are not clear, or widely known among OSS developers. As a result, many OSS projects, after a certain long period of evolution, stop evolving, in fact becoming “inactive” or “abandoned” projects. This paper presents an analysis of the population of projects contained within one of the largest OSS repositories available (SourceForge.net), in order to describe how projects abandoned by their developers can be identified, and to discuss the attributes and characteristics of these inactive projects. In particular, the paper attempts to differentiate projects that experienced maintainability issues from those that are inactive for other reasons, in order to be able to correlate common characteristics to the “failure” of these projects