Comparing practices for reuse in integration‐oriented software product lines and large open source software projects

This article compares the organization and practices for software reuse in integration‐oriented software product lines (SPLs) and open source software projects. The main observation is that both approaches are successful regarding large variability and reuse, but differ widely in their practices and organization. To capture practices in large open source projects, we describe an open compositional model, which reflects their more decentralized organization of software development. We capture key practices and organizational forms for this and validate these by comparing four case studies of this model. Two of these studies are based on published SPL case studies, for the other two we analyze the practices in two large and successful open source projects based on their published developer documentation. Our analysis highlights key differences between the practices in the two open source organizations and the more integrational practices used in the other two cases. Finally, we discuss which practices are successful in which environment and how the current practices can move towards more open, widely scoped and distributed software development. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Free and open source development practices in the game community

The free and open source software (FOSS) approach lets community of like-minded participants develop software systems and related artifacts that are shared freely instead of offered as closed-source commercial products. Free (as in freedom) software and open source are closely related but slightly different approaches and licensing schemes for developing publicly shared software. FOSS development communities don't seem to adopt modern software engineering processes. FOSS communities develop software that's extremely valuable, generally reliable, globally distributed, made available for acquisition at little or no cost, and readily used in its community. Free and open source software development practices gives rise to new view of how complex software systems can be constructed, deployed, and evolved. They rely on lean electronic communication media, virtual project management, and version management mechanisms to coordinate globally dispersed development efforts. These FOSS processes offer new directions for developing complex software systems. We look at the FOSS computer game community to provide examples of common development processes and practices.     

Strategies for software-based hybrid business models

The open source approach to software development has been used by software organizations in tandem with their existing business models, which are based on proprietary software licensing. This led to the creation of hybrid business models that merge open source and proprietary paradigms. This paper explores the practices used by software product vendors using hybrid business models and proposes strategies emerging out of these practices using interpretive, single case study research design.     

From proprietary to open source—Growing an open source ecosystem

In today's business and software arena, Free/Libre/Open Source Software has emerged as a promising platform for software ecosystems. Following this trend, more and more companies are releasing their proprietary software as open source, forming a software ecosystem of related development projects complemented with a social ecosystem of community members. Since the trend is relatively recent, there are few guidelines on how to create and maintain a sustainable open source ecosystem for a proprietary software. This paper studies the problem of building open source communities for industrial software that was originally developed as closed source. Supporting processes, guidelines and best practices are discussed and illustrated through an industrial case study. The research is paving the road for new directions in growing a thriving open source ecosystem.     

Commodification of Industrial Software: A Case for Open Source

The European software-intensive industry is facing challenges related to heterogeneous distributed development. These challenges are due to the commodification of software. Software that originally was differentiating (that is, helped distinguish one company's products from another's) is now available as a commodity. So, embedded systems companies are adopting open source practices and becoming involved in open source development. This article illustrates how two large European companies in the secondary software sector utilize collaborative open source development to deal with software commodification. Software commodification can also lead to new forms of collaborative development, such as inner-source development.     

“The Canary in the Coal Mine…” A cautionary tale from the decline of SourceForge

Forges are online collaborative platforms to support the development of distributed open source software. While once mighty keepers of open source vitality, software forges are rapidly becoming less and less relevant. For example, of the top 10 forges in 2011, only one survives today—SourceForge —the biggest of them all, but its numbers are dropping and its community is tenuous at best. Through mixed-methods research, this article chronicles and analyze the software practice and experiences of the project's history—in particular its architectural and community/organizational decisions. We discovered a number of suboptimal social and architectural decisions and circumstances that, may have led to SourceForge 's demise. In addition, we found evidence suggesting that the impact of such decisions could have been monitored, reduced, and possibly avoided altogether. The use of sociotechnical insights needs to become a basic set of design and software/organization monitoring principles that tell a cautionary tale on what to measure and what not to do in the context of large-scale software forge and community design and management.     

Open source software and the algorithm visualization community

Algorithm visualizations are widely viewed as having the potential for major impact on computer science education, but their quality is highly variable. We report on the software development practices used by creators of algorithm visualizations, based on data that can be inferred from a catalog of over 600 algorithm visualizations. Since nearly all are free for use and many provide source code, they might be construed as being open source software. Yet many AV developers do not appear to have used open source best practices. We discuss how such development practices might be employed by the algorithm visualization community, and how they might lead to improved algorithm visualizations in the future. We conclude with a discussion of OpenDSA, an open-source project that builds on earlier progress in the field of algorithm visualization and hopes to use open-source procedures to gain users and contributors.     

Comparative case studies of open source software peer review practices

ContextThe power of open source software peer review lies in the involvement of virtual communities, especially users who typically do not have a formal role in the development process. As communities grow to a certain extent, how to organize and support the peer review process becomes increasingly challenging. A universal solution is likely to fail for communities with varying characteristics.ObjectiveThis paper investigates differences of peer review practices across different open source software communities, especially the ones engage distinct types of users, in order to offer contextualized guidance for developing open source software projects.MethodComparative case studies were conducted in two well-established large open source communities, Mozilla and Python, which engage extremely different types of users. Bug reports from their bug tracking systems were examined primarily, complemented by secondary sources such as meeting notes, blog posts, messages from mailing lists, and online documentations.ResultsThe two communities differ in the key activities of peer review processes, including different characteristics with respect to bug reporting, design decision making, to patch development and review. Their variances also involve the designs of supporting technology. The results highlight the emerging role of triagers, who bridge the core and peripheral contributors and facilitate the peer review process. The two communities demonstrate alternative designs of open source software peer review and their tradeoffs were discussed.ConclusionIt is concluded that contextualized designs of social and technological solutions to open source software peer review practices are important. The two cases can serve as learning resources for open source software projects, or other types of large software projects in general, to cope with challenges of leveraging enormous contributions and coordinating core developers. It is also important to improve support for triagers, who have not received much research effort yet.     

The Third Design Space: A postcolonial perspective on corporate engagement with open source software communities

Corporations increasingly engage with open source software communities in the co‐creation of software. This collaboration between corporate professionals and open source software community members is strikingly different from the early days of software development where for‐profit firms attempted to dominate and control the industry while attempting to throttle the success of independent developers offering an alternative, open source option. While many metaphors like trading zones, common pool resources and ecosystems have helped understand the phenomenon, the metaphors do not portray what the industry was like before and after the transition. We adopt a postcolonial metaphor as an analytical lens to examine such collaboration based on qualitative data gathered over three years from executives, managers and developers within corporations that engage in open source software development. Drawing on these insights, we then theorize a “Third Design Space,” based on the concept of the third space proposed by Bhabha. This metaphor encourages the cultivation of a new design environment, creation of new design associations and circulation of shared design resources. Together these practices and behaviours make it possible to nurture innovative methods and new rituals for designing software with results and methods that represent a distinct departure from the competitive and proprietary past, even creating innovative artefacts that could not have been created without the Third Design Space.     

An Empirical Study on the Relationship Between Software Design Quality, Development Effort and Governance in Open Source Projects

The relationship among software design quality, development effort, and governance practices is a traditional research problem. However, the extent to which consolidated results on this relationship remain valid for open source (OS) projects is an open research problem. An emerging body of literature contrasts the view of open source as an alternative to proprietary software and explains that there exists a continuum between closed and open source projects. This paper hypothesizes that as projects approach the OS end of the continuum, governance becomes less formal. In turn a less formal governance is hypothesized to require a higher-quality code as a means to facilitate coordination among developers by making the structure of code explicit and facilitate quality by removing the pressure of deadlines from contributors. However, a less formal governance is also hypothesized to increase development effort due to a more cumbersome coordination overhead. The verification of research hypotheses is based on empirical data from a sample of 75 major OS projects. Empirical evidence supports our hypotheses and suggests that software quality, mainly measured as coupling and inheritance, does not increase development effort, but represents an important managerial variable to implement the more open governance approach that characterizes OS projects which, in turn, increases development effort.     

An empirical study of integration activities in distributions of open source software

Reuse of software components, either closed or open source, is considered to be one of the most important best practices in software engineering, since it reduces development cost and improves software quality. However, since reused components are (by definition) generic, they need to be customized and integrated into a specific system before they can be useful. Since this integration is system-specific, the integration effort is non-negligible and increases maintenance costs, especially if more than one component needs to be integrated. This paper performs an empirical study of multi-component integration in the context of three successful open source distributions (Debian, Ubuntu and FreeBSD). Such distributions integrate thousands of open source components with an operating system kernel to deliver a coherent software product to millions of users worldwide. We empirically identified seven major integration activities performed by the maintainers of these distributions, documented how these activities are being performed by the maintainers, then evaluated and refined the identified activities with input from six maintainers of the three studied distributions. The documented activities provide a common vocabulary for component integration in open source distributions and outline a roadmap for future research on software integration.     

Can the case for CASE technology be advanced by Process Improvement?

Findings of a case study that focused on understanding how software development proceeded in a small Information Systems Department (ISD) located within a major public sector service are presented. The observations collected relate to a period prior to, during and after the introduction of a CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tool. They are based on a combination of minutes from quality circle meetings, interviews and regular on-site observations by the first author. The study used a framework loosely based on SEI's CMM model to characterize the state of practice before and after the introduction of the tool and to assess process improvement.Prior to the introduction of the first CASE tool a typical ISD software development task was a standalone single reporting application. The software development process model consisted simply of requirements acquisition and program development. Both these activities for a particular application were carried out by an individual developer within a few months. The former activity involved the client/user, with the level of participation dependent on the developer. Similarly, program development varied from one developer to another, with most effort being expended on coding and testing. Not surprisingly, maintenance was locked to the original developer.A decision that ISD should develop larger and more complex applications triggered the purchase of a CASE tool. Typically, the larger applications would be developed by a team of about five people over a period of twelve or more months. The introduction of CASE tools, first Case Designer 5.1 then Designer 2000, had a marked effect on the working practices of ISD. Specifically two more stages were introduced into the development activity: designing via an entity-attribute relationship model and validation via rapid prototyping; and greater attention was paid to the management of testing and fault reporting.The paper explores whether the benefits accrued by ISD can be attributed to the CASE tool, the changes in work practices, or a combination of both.     

Managing license compliance in free and open source software development

License compliance in Free and Open Source Software development is a significant issue today and organizations using free and open source software are predominately focusing on this issue. The non-compliance to licenses in free and open source software development leads to the loss of reputation and the high costs of litigation for organizations. Towards an automated compliance management, we use the Open Digital Rights Language to implement the clauses of open source software licenses in a machine interpretable way and propose a novel algorithm that analyzes compatibility between free and open source software licenses. Also, we describe a framework that inductively manages compliance of license clauses in a free and open source software development. We simulate and evaluate the formalized license compliance management by analyzing a real-time open source software project GRASS.     

开源许可证合规性研究

随着开源概念的逐步深入,开源软件成为软件发展的潮流.同时,开源软件的使用受各类开源许可证约束.开源参与者在开发过程中该如何为自己的开源软件选择合适的许可证,确保高效合理地使用社区群体智慧劳动成果,仍是一个亟需解决的问题.为此,首先分析和解读了开放源代码促进会认证的常用开源许可证,通过对许可证条款内容和结构的研究,得到开源许可证框架及许可证兼容性推导模型,并将该模型应用于对我国自主研发的木兰宽松许可证的分析和解读.最后,基于上述工作研发了开源许可证选择工具,为开源开发者对许可证的理解和合规使用提供了参考和决策支持.     

考虑排错过程引进故障的开源软件可靠性模型研究

近年来,开源软件在软件行业很受欢迎。但是,开源软件的可靠性却受到人们的广泛质疑。如何评估开源软件的可靠性是一个重要的问题。与传统的闭源软件相比,在建立开源软件可靠性模型时,必须考虑故障引入和故障检测与排错之间的延迟时间这两个因素。本文考虑了排错过程和不完美调试现象,提出了相应的开源软件可靠性模型。并且我们用两个开源软件故障数据集实来验证提出模型的拟合性能与预测性能。实验结果表明,提出的模型在开源软件可靠性评估中具有良好的拟合和预测性能。提出的模型可以用于开源软件在实际的开发过程中的可靠性评估。     

Hypertext and CASE

Computer-aided software engineering (CASE) systems require a database system that must let designers logically associate documentation and source code, make annotations to record explanations and assumptions, and manage different versions of the software. The author reports the development of a database, Neptune, which demonstrates that hypertext provides an appropriate data model for CASE systems. Hypertext is a medium-grained, entity-relationship-like data model that lets information be structured arbitrarily and keeps a complete version history of both information and structure. Neptune achieves application independence by using a layered system architecture; at the bottom is a transaction-based server, the Hypertext Abstract Machine, and layered above it are applications and the user interface. The use of Neptune in the Dynamic Design CASE environment is discussed     

OpenStack开源社区中商业组织的参与模式

2000年以来,开源软件取得了显著进展,展示出一种以用户创新为驱动且低成本高质量的新型软件开发方式.越来越多的商业组织参与到开源项目中,期望利用开源软件及其优势实现自身的商业目标.由于开源软件开发方式与传统的软件工程方法存在显著差异,为了加入开源社区,商业组织必须要对自身原有的软件开发方式、业务模式等做出调整.在这种情况下,一个亟待解决的问题是商业组织应当采取怎样的参与模式才能有效融入开源社区.为此,本文进行了如下三个方面的研究：1.采用雪球采样方法对OpenStack相关的文本数据进行收集,为定性分析提供数据基础;2.借鉴扎根理论,通过对所收集数据的过滤和归纳,总结出不同商业组织参与OpenStack的模式;3.在此基础上,提炼出四种更具一般性的参与模式,为商业组织参与开源项目提供经验参考与决策支持.     

The Measurement of the Software Ecosystem’s Productivity with GitHub

Software productivity has always been one of the most critical metrics for measuring software development. However, with the open-source community (e.g., GitHub), new software development models are emerging. The traditional productivity metrics do not provide a comprehensive measure of the new software development models. Therefore, it is necessary to build a productivity measurement model of open source software ecosystem suitable for the open-source community’s production activities. Based on the natural ecosystem, this paper proposes concepts related to the productivity of open source software ecosystems, analyses influencing factors of open source software ecosystem productivity, and constructs a measurement model using these factors. Model validation experiments show that the model is compatible with a large portion of open source software ecosystems in GitHub. This study can provide references for participants of the open-source software ecosystem to choose proper types of ecosystems. The study also provides a basis for ecosystem health assessment for researchers interested in ecosystem quality.     

IGSTK: an open source software toolkit for image-guided surgery

Image-guided surgery applies leading-edge technology and clinical practices to provide better quality of life to patients who can benefit from minimally invasive procedures. Reliable software is a critical component of image-guided surgical applications, yet costly expertise and technology infrastructure barriers hamper current research and commercialization efforts in this area. IGSTK applies the open source development and delivery model to this problem. Agile and component-based software engineering principles reduce the costs and risks associated with adopting this new technology, resulting in a safe, inexpensive, robust, shareable, and reusable software infrastructure.