Selection of third party software in Off-The-Shelf-based software development—An interview study with industrial practitioners

Abstract

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 paper's 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.

Collaborative Resolution of Requirements Mismatches When Adopting Open Source Components

“…Component selection process: none of the interviewees reported the usage of formal evaluation processes, which are abundant in literature [7,10], in their projects. This observation is similar to findings from a previous study [20]. The evaluation activity is normally undertaken in ad hoc manner.…”

OSS Integration Issues and Community Support: An Integrator Perspective

“…Furthermore, the literature has pointed out the underestimation of integration effort and inefficient debugging as problematic areas that require further investigation [20]; therefore, we stated RQ1.2 and RQ1.3 respectively. Finally, as a previous study [13] reported that getting OSS components information seems to become a continuous monitoring activity rather than being on a project demand basis, we stated RQ1.4 to understand how integrators monitor OSS communities.…”

“…The interview guide was carefully designed following the guidelines stated in [11] and previous experience performing international surveys from several members of the team [12], [13], [14, [15]. The survey was designed as a 5-section survey, with both closed and open questions.…”

Developing Software with Open Source Software Components

“…The interview guide used in the study may be consulted at [5]. The target population was practitioners in charge of performing OSS component selection activities.…”