Claudia P. Ayala

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 papers 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.

SYSTEMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF i STRATEGIC DEPENDENCY MODELS FOR SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEMS

Goal- and agent-oriented models have become a consolidated type of artifact in various software and knowledge engineering activities. Several languages exist for representing such type of models but there is a lack of associated methodologies for guiding their construction up to the necessary level of detail. In this paper we present RiSD, a method for building Strategic Dependency (SD) models in the i* notation. RiSD is defined in a prescriptive way to reduce uncertainness when constructing the model. RiSD tackles three fundamental issues: (1) it tends to reduce the average size of the resulting models; (2) it defines some traceability relationships among model elements; (3) it provides some lexical and syntactical conventions. As a result, we may say that RiSD supports the construction process of goal- and agent-oriented models whilst increasing their understanding.

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.

A goal-oriented strategy for supporting commercial off-the-shelf components selection

The use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components is becoming a strategic need because they offer the possibility to build systems at reduced costs and within shorter development time. Having efficient and reliable COTS components selection methods is a key issue not only for exploiting the potential benefits of this technology, but also for facing the problems and risks involved. Searching COTS components requires to overcome several obstacles: the growing size and evolvability of the COTS marketplace, the dependencies from the components to be selected with others, and the type of descriptions currently available for those components. In this paper, we present a goal-oriented strategy for an effective localization, analysis and structuring of COTS components information. Our proposal is the GOThIC method, which provides methodological support to the construction of taxonomies. We present the seven activities that conform this method, which are illustrated with the case of real-time synchronous communication tools.

Adoption of OSS components

Open Source Software (OSS) has become a strategic asset for a number of reasons, such as short time-to-market software delivery, reduced development and maintenance costs, and its customization capabilities. Therefore, organizations are increasingly becoming OSS adopters, either as a result of a strategic decision or because it is almost unavoidable nowadays, given the fact that most commercial software also relies at some extent in OSS infrastructure. The way in which organizations adopt OSS affects and shapes their businesses. Therefore, knowing the impact of different OSS adoption strategies in the context of an organization may help improving the processes undertaken inside this organization and ultimately pave the road to strategic moves. In this paper, we propose to model OSS adoption strategies using a goal-oriented notation, in which different actors state their objectives and dependencies on each other. These models describe the consequences of adopting one such strategy or another: which are the strategic and operational goals that are supported, which are the resources that emerge, etc. The models rely on an OSS ontology, built upon a systematic literature review, which comprises the activities and resources that characterize these strategies. Different OSS adoption strategy models arrange these ontology elements in diverse ways. In order to assess which is the OSS adoption strategy that better fits the organization needs, the notion of model coverage is introduced, which allows to measure the degree of concordance among every strategy with the model of the organization by comparing the respective models. The approach is illustrated with an example of application in a big telecommunications company.

Collaborative resolution of requirements mismatches when adopting open source components

[Context and motivation] There is considerable flexibility in requirements specifications (both functional and non-functional), as well as in the features of available OSS components. This allows a collaborative matching and negotiation process between stakeholders such as: customers, software contractors and OSS communities, regarding desired requirements versus available and thus reusable OSS components. [Problem] However, inconclusive research exists on such cooperative processes. Not much empirical data exists supporting the conduction of such research based on observation of industrial OSS adoption projects. This paper investigates how functional and non-functional requirement mismatches are handled in practice. [Results] We found two common approaches to handle functional mismatches. The main resolution approach is to get the components changed by the development team, OSS community or commercial vendor. The other resolution approach is to influence requirements, often by postponing requirements. Overall, non-functional requirements are satisfactorily achieved by using OSS components. Last but not least, we found that the customer involvement could enhance functional mismatch resolution while OSS community involvement could improve non-functional mismatch resolution. [Contribution] Our data suggests that the selecting components should be done iteratively with close collaboration with stakeholders. Improvement in requirement mismatch resolution to requirements could be achieved by careful consideration of mismatches size, requirements flexibility and components quality.

Impact of stakeholder type and collaboration on issue resolution time in OSS Projects

Initialized by a collective contribution of volunteer developers, Open source software (OSS) attracts an increasing involvement of commercial firms. Many OSS projects are composed of a mix group of firm-paid and volunteer developers, with different motivations, collaboration practices and working styles. As OSS development consists of collaborative works in nature, it is important to know whether these differences have an impact on collaboration between difference types of stakeholders, which lead to an influence in the project outcomes. In this paper, we empirically investigate the firm-paid participation in resolving OSS evolution issues, the stakeholder collaboration and its impact on OSS issue resolution time. The results suggest that though a firm-paid assigned developer resolves much more issues than a volunteer developer does, there is no difference in issue resolution time between them. Besides, the more important factor that influences the issue resolution time comes from the collaboration among stakeholders rather than from individual characteristics.

Domain analysis for supporting commercial off-the-shelf components selection

Though new technological trends and paradigms arise for developing complex software systems, systematic reuse continues to be an elusive goal. In this context, the adoption of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technologies introduces many challenges that still have not been fully overcome, such as the lack of comprehensive mechanisms to record and manage the required information for supporting COTS components selection. In this paper we present a domain analysis approach for gathering the information needed to describe COTS market segments as required for effective COTS components selection. Due to the diversity of the information to capture, we propose different dimensions of interest for COTS components selection that are covered by different domain models. These models are articulated by means of a single framework based on a widespread software quality standard.

On goal-oriented COTS taxonomies construction

This paper proposes the adoption of a goal-based method called GBRAM for facilitating the process of building taxonomies of COTS components. Since GBRAM was defined in a different setting, the main result of the paper is to adapt it to this new context obtaining the GBTCM method. We show how the different activities and artifacts of GBRAM change, and we apply the proposal to obtain a taxonomy for requirements engineering oriented tools.

Empirical validation of human factors in predicting issue lead time in open source projects

[Context] Software developers often spend a significant portion of their resources resolving submitted evolution issue reports. Classification or prediction of issue lead time is useful for prioritizing evolution issues and supporting human resources allocation in software maintenance. However, the predictability of issue lead time is still a research gap that calls for more empirical investigation. [Aim] In this paper, we empirically assess different types of issue lead time prediction models using human factor measures collected from issue tracking systems. [Method] We conduct an empirical investigation of three active open source projects. A machine learning based classification and statistical univariate and multivariate analyses are performed. [Results] The accuracy of classification models in ten-fold cross-validation varies from 75.56% to 91%. The R2 value of linear multivariate regression models ranges from 0.29 to 0.60. Correlation analysis confirms the effectiveness of collaboration measures, such as the number of stakeholders and number of comments, in prediction models. The measures of assignee past performance are also an effective indicator of issue lead time. [Conclusions] The results indicate that the number of stakeholders and average past issue lead time are important variables in constructing prediction models of issue lead time. However, more variables should be explored to achieve better prediction performance.