The paper summarizes the results of several industrial surveys on issues related to the development of systems using Commercial-Off-The-Shelf and Open Source Software components. The results demonstrate the following. (1) There is a discrepancy between academic theory and industrial practices regarding the use of components. One reason is that researchers have empirically evaluated only a few theoretical methods; hence, industrial practitioners currently have no reason to adopt them. Another reason might be that researchers have specified the contexts of application of only a small number of theories in sufficient detail to avoid misleading users. (2) Academic researchers often hold false assumptions about industry. For example, research on requirement negotiations often assumes that a client will be interested in, and be capable of, discussing the technical details of a project. However, in practice this is usually not true. In addition, the quality of a component in the final system is often attributed solely to component quality before integration, ignoring quality improvements by integrators during component integration.

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) with Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) or Open Source Software (OSS) components are more and more frequently being used in industrial software development. We therefore need to issue experience-based guidelines for the evaluation, selection and integration of such components. We have performed a survey on industrial COTS/OSS development in three countries - Norway, Italy and Germany. Concrete survey results, e.g. on risk management policies and process tailoring, are not being described here, but in other papers. This is a method paper, reporting on the challenges, approaches and experiences gained by conducting the main survey. The main contributions are as follows: At best we can achieve a stratifled-random sample of ICT companies, followed by a convenience sample of relevant projects. This is probably the first software engineering survey using census type data, and has revealed that the entire sampling and contact process ca n be unexpectedly expensive. It is also hard to avoid national variations in the total process, possibly leading to uncontrollable method biases

Component-based software development (CBSD) is becoming more and more important since it promotes reuse to higher levels of abstraction. As a consequence, many components are available being either open-source software (OSS) or commercial-off-theshelf (COTS). However, it is still unclear how the decision for acquiring OSS or COTS components is made in practice. This paper describes an empirical study on why project decisionmakers selected COTS instead of OSS components, or vice versa. The study was performed as an international survey in Norway, Italy and Germany. It focused on decision making on using offthe-shelf (OTS) components. We have gathered answers from 83 projects using only COTS components and 44 projects using only OSS components. Results of this study show significant differences and commonalities of integrating OSS or COTS components. Moreover, the study illustrates several research questions that warrant future research.

No abstract

No abstract