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Developing Software with Open Source Software Components

  • Chapter
Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse

Abstract

The success of Component-Based Software Development is based on the ability of an implementer team to select, assemble and integrate third-party and other components with own application software, in order to create a software system that satisfies (most of) the customer/client’s stated needs in an economic and flexible way. Nowadays, the reuse of Open Source Software (OSS) components available from the Internet is playing a strategic role in the industry. This chapter aims at providing empirical evidence on current industrial OSS selection practices based on semi-structured interviews performed in 17 European organizations. In particular, the study tackles the following activities: (1) initial identification of available OSS components, (2) closer evaluation of the identified components, (3) conclusive decision-making of the chosen ones, and (4) updating of OSS-relevant experience and knowledge for the actual company. For simplicity we have omitted system-wide integration and testing activities. The results of this study ought to be valuable not just for researchers, as a sobering basis in their quest for practical selection methods; but also for practitioners that regularly drive OSS selection processes with potential to learn from other colleagues’ work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “A software component is a unit of composition with contractually specified interfaces and explicit context dependencies only and can be composed according to a component model by third party without modification [48]”.

  2. 2.

    A classification schema corresponds to an ontology or taxonomy. Consider the joint work by WHO and the National Institutes of Health in USA on a common term base for medicine, currently with over 1.8 million terms. So, coping with the size, evolution, consistency, and up-front costs of many classification schemas represent formidable challenges. In addition comes the more fundamental, “cultural-political” issues behind missing standardization or agreement on many terms, simply due to incompatible perceptions of the world at large [12].

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Acknowledgements

We thank all people that participated in piloting an early version of the interview guide and the interview participants who took time from their work days to participate in our interviews.

This work has been partially supported by the Spanish project TIN2010-19130-C02-01.

We are very grateful to our anonymous reviewers who took the time to provide detailed and thoughtful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technical University of Catalunya, UPC Campus Nord-Omega, ES-08034, Barcelona, Spain

    Claudia Ayala & Xavier Franch

  2. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Reidar Conradi & Daniela Cruzes

  3. DNV Research & Innovation, Veritasveien 1, NO-1363, Høvik, Norway

    Jingyue Li

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  1. Claudia Ayala
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Correspondence to Claudia Ayala .

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  1. Many Roads Studios, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Susan Elliott Sim

  2. Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA

    Rosalva E. Gallardo-Valencia

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Ayala, C., Franch, X., Conradi, R., Li, J., Cruzes, D. (2013). Developing Software with Open Source Software Components. In: Sim, S.E., Gallardo-Valencia, R.E. (eds) Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6596-6_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6596-6_9

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