Aligning Business Goals and Risks in OSS Adoption

Abstract

Abstract. Increasing adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) requires a change in the organizational culture and reshaping IT decision-makers mindset. Adopting OSS software components introduces some risks that can affect the adopter organization's business goals, therefore they need to be considered. To assess these risks, it is required to understand the socio-technical structures that interrelate the stakeholders in the OSS ecosystem, and how these structures may propagate the potential risks to them. In this paper, we study the connection between OSS adoption risks and OSS adopter organizations' business goals. We propose a model-based approach and analysis framework that combines two existing frameworks: the i* framework to model and reason about business goals, and the RiskML notation to represent and analyse OSS adoption risks. We illustrate our approach with data drawn from an industrial partner organization in a joint EU project.

GRALD: an Approach for Goal and Risk Analysis in the Development of Information Systems for the Web of Data

“…Goal and Risk Analysis for Linked Data (GRALD) is based on two existing approaches: RISCOSS and FrameWeb-LD. We chose to combine these two approaches because, on the one hand, RISCOSS uses two different languages for modeling goals (iStar) and risks (RiskML), which allows one to study how the same risks may affect different strategies or ecosystems (Costal et al, 2015). Moreover, RISCOSS extends the goal analysis support in iStar, allowing us to analyze how risks are propagated in the goal graph.…”

“…The RISCOSS project 5 (Costal et al, 2015;López, 2015) came about because of the growing adoption of OSS (Open Source Software) by organizations. The occurrence of risks in the adoption of OSS can impact the business goals of the organization.…”

“…KAOS allows not only goal modeling but also obstacle analysis. The RISCOSS project (Costal et al, 2015) proposes to integrate risk modeling language RiskML with goal modeling language iStar to analyze risks in the adoption of open source software. With some effort, these approaches can be adapted to the analysis of risks in the development of Linked Data Systems.…”

“…This paper proposes Goal and Risk Analysis for Linked Data (GRALD), an approach that applies GORE and risk analysis techniques for the development of Linked Data Systems. GRALD is based on the RISCOSS approach (Costal et al, 2015) which seeks to align business goals and risks in the adoption of open source software, modeling risks with the RiskML language. The modeling of goals is done with iStar (Yu, 2009), aiming to understand the social domain to enable requirements engineering, defining social concepts.…”

Risk assessment in open source systems

“…A set of scientific papers produced in the RISCOSS project serve to document the main concepts presented [3][6] [7] [8]. As for tool support, during the briefing we use the RISCOSS platform [9].…”