Adoption of OSS components: A goal-oriented approach

Abstract

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 characterise 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.

OSSAP – A Situational Method for Defining Open Source Software Adoption Processes

“…We have applied the re-engineering SME method [8] on the DKE-approach [5]. As explained in Section 2.1, the reengineering SME recommends to redefine first the process model of the existing method by using the Map formalism.…”

“…OSSAP builds upon a previous work [5] that we name the DKE-approach (after its publication venue) where we proposed a catalogue of i* models to represent different OSS adoption strategies. These strategies were formulated by assigning in different ways the concepts of an OSS ontology into two actors that belong to an OSS ecosystem: the adopter organization and the OSS community that delivers the software.…”

“… MC2: OSS adoption strategy selection. Provides the guidelines to select OSS adoption strategies as described in the DKE-approach [5]. Since these guidelines include a catalogue of candidate models (see Section 2.2), MC2 can be considered as an aggregate method chunk and each of the six OSS adoption strategy models as a sub-chunk, MC2.1-MC2.6 (e.g., MC2.1 is OSS Acquisition adoption strategy).…”

“…These strategies were formulated by assigning in different ways the concepts of an OSS ontology into two actors that belong to an OSS ecosystem: the adopter organization and the OSS community that delivers the software. The catalogue of adoption strategies is described in [5]. In short: (1) OSS acquisition consists in using existing OSS code without contributing to the underlying OSS project/community; (2) OSS integration implies the active participation of an organization in an OSS community with the purpose to share and co-create OSS in order to benefit from the commonly created OSS components; (3) OSS initiative consists in initiating an OSS project and establishing a community around it over which control is exercised; (4) OSS takeover means to take over an existing OSS project/community and to control it; (5) OSS fork consists in creating an own independent version of the software that is available from an existing OSS project or community; (6) OSS release implies that the organization releases bespoke software as OSS but does not care whether an OSS community forms around it.…”

“… Definition of the coverage metrics provided by the DKE-approach (see [5], Section 6.1). Table 2 presents the sub-chunk MC2.1 for the OSS Acquisition adoption strategy.…”