After more than 20 years of research and practice in software configuration management (SCM), constructing consistent configurations of versioned software products still remains a challenge. This article focuses on the version models underlying both commercial systems and research prototypes. It provides an overview and classification of different versioning paradigms and defines and relates fundamental concepts such as revisions, variants, configurations, and changes. In particular, we focus on intensional versioning, that is, construction of versions based on configuration rules. Finally, we provide an overview of systems that have had significant impact on the development of the SCM discipline and classify them according to a detailed taxonomy.
Context: Open source software (OSS) is changing the way organizations develop, acquire, use, and commercialize software. Objective: This paper seeks to identify how organizations adopt OSS, classify the literature according to these ways of adopting OSS, and with a focus on software development evaluate the research on adoption of OSS in organizations. Method: Based on the systematic literature review method we reviewed publications from 24 journals and seven conference and workshop proceedings, published between 1998 and 2008. From a population of 24289 papers, we identified 112 papers which provide empirical evidence on how organizations actually adopt OSS. Results: We show that adopting OSS involves more than simply using OSS products. We moreover provide a classification framework consisting of six distinctly different ways in which organizations adopt OSS. This framework is used to illustrate some of the opportunities and challenges organizations meet when approaching OSS, to show that OSS can be adopted successfully in different ways, and to organize and review existing research. We find that this research does not sufficiently describe the context of the organizations studied. It is furthermore fragmented and fails to benefit fully from related research fields. Finally, we present directions for future research.
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.
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