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

Abstract

Abstract.Organizations are increasingly becoming Open Source Software (OSS) adopters, either as a result of a strategic decision or just as a consequence of technological choices. The strategy followed to adopt OSS shapes organizations' businesses; therefore methods to assess such impact are needed. In this paper, we propose OSSAP, a method for defining OSS Adoption business Processes, built using a Situational Method Engineering (SME) approach. We use SME to combine two well-known modelling methods, namely goal-oriented models (using i*) and business process models (using BPMN), with a preexisting catalogue of goal-oriented OSS adoption strategy models. First, we define a repository of reusable method chunks, including the guidelines to apply them. Then, we define OSSAP as a composition of those method chunks to help organizations to improve their business processes in order to integrate the best fitting OSS adoption strategy. We illustrate it with an example of application in a telecommunications company.

Considerations and challenges for the adoption of open source components in software-intensive businesses

“…Stol and Ali Babar (2010b) identified twenty evaluation methods and frameworks developed between 2003 and 2009, but their adoption has been limited. Research has instead shown that practice is often less formalised (Hauge et al, 2010;Ayala et al, 2011b;Lenarduzzi et al, 2019;Franch et al, 2015;López L. Costal et al, 2016). A systematic literature review by Hauge et al (2010) found six distinct approaches recorded by researchers for evaluating OSS software, including components to be used in software products.…”

“…business software projects incorporating Open Source Software (OSS) components (Synopsys, 2020;Tidelift, 2019;Szulik, 2018). Managers and practitioners in software-intensive businesses using CBSD frequently make decisions concerning the adoption of OSS components to be integrated into their tools and products (Franch et al, 2015;López L. Costal et al, 2016;Hauge et al, 2009Hauge et al, , 2010Stol and Ali Babar, 2010a;Ayala et al, 2011a;Lundell et al, 2017;Lenarduzzi et al, 2019;Spinellis, 2019;Kazimierczak et al, 2020). A key economic motivation for many businesses is the use of OSS as a means of short-cutting resource intensive software development processes (Spinellis, 2019;European Commission, 2017;Kazimierczak et al, 2020;Petersen et al, 2018;Badampudi et al, 2016).…”

Using Contextual Goal Models for Constructing Situational Methods

“…Recently, iStar2.0 [6] goal models have been used in SME, mainly to formalize the content of method chunks [12] as reusable goal models. In [9] we have introduced the idea of using contextual iStar2.0 for specifying method requirements.…”

Agile Quality Requirements Management Best Practices Portfolio: A Situational Method Engineering Approach

“…This case also demonstrated the effectiveness of the SME approach for modelling large-scale engineering processes. In a different domain, López et al presented the OSSAP method [14], applying assembly-based SME approach to construct a method for OSS adoption business processes. The OSSAP chunks correspond to the different ways of adopting OSS and the pieces of processes to be adopted by the organization, depending on the way they want to be involved with the OSS community producing the OSS.…”