An empirical study on software development with open source components in the chinese software industry

Abstract

Chinese software companies are increasingly using open source software (OSS) components in software development. Development with OSS components faces challenges with respect to component selection, component integration, licensing compliance, and system maintenance. Although these issues have been investigated in the industry in other countries, few similar studies have been performed in China. It is therefore difficult for Chinese software companies to be aware of their special issues and to make the necessary improvements. This article describes a questionnaire-based survey of software development with OSS components in Chinese software companies. Data from 47 completed development projects in 43 companies were collected. The results show that the main motivation behind using OSS components was their modifiability and low license cost. Using a web search engine was the most common method of locating OSS components. Local acquaintance and compliance requirements were the major decisive factors in choosing a suitable component. To avoid legal exposure, the common strategy was to use components without licensing constraints. The major cost of OSS-based projects was the cost to learn and understand OSS components. Almost 84% of the components needed bug fixing or other changes to the code. However, close participation with the OSS community was rare.

OSS Integration Issues and Community Support: An Integrator Perspective

“…This confirms the observations from [21][22][23][24] that emphasize that most organizations seem to have rather limited contributions to the OSS communities. Furthermore, although our results show that the most frequent way to contribute was by providing bug reports without code, the number of integrators that also submitted the code for fixing the bug was also high.…”

Developing Software with Open Source Software Components

“…However, the analysis of most existing methods show that while most of them recommend saving the documentation from the selection process, they do not address adequate mechanisms for recording and managing this body of knowledge (see [3] for an overview). Furthermore, the evidence presented by Chen et al [14] shows that learning represents one of the major costs of OSS-based development -as for software maintenance in general. Therefore, companies need to effectively manage their OSS-related knowledge in order to exploit the potential benefits of OSS [34].…”

“…However, reusing OSS components (and third party software in general) creates challenges for their appropriate selection and proper integration, testing and maintenance [14]. In addition, licensing terms should be carefully addressed, especially if an OSS-based system is going to be distributed or sold to the general market [26].…”

“…The existing studies usually also refer to single case studies or experience reports whose contexts are scarcely described and that provide limited information about how the OSS components are integrated. Only a few studies have conducted large-scale field studies representing several industrial sectors [14][32] [34]. However, all of these studies provide little concrete advice related to OSS component selection and knowledge management activities, which are two of the pressing problems that software integrators face every day.…”

The Importance of Architectural Knowledge in Integrating Open Source Software

“…Various authors have reported studies of CBSD with OSS products [6][7][8][9], or more generally with Off-The-Shelf (OTS) components (both OSS and COTS) [10,11]. Most of these studies focus on evaluation and selection of components, which is a critical aspect in CBSD.…”