Development with Off-the-Shelf Components: 10 Facts

Abstract

The paper summarizes the results of several industrial surveys on issues related to the development of systems using Commercial-Off-The-Shelf and Open Source Software components. The results demonstrate the following. (1) There is a discrepancy between academic theory and industrial practices regarding the use of components. One reason is that researchers have empirically evaluated only a few theoretical methods; hence, industrial practitioners currently have no reason to adopt them. Another reason might be that researchers have specified the contexts of application of only a small number of theories in sufficient detail to avoid misleading users. (2) Academic researchers often hold false assumptions about industry. For example, research on requirement negotiations often assumes that a client will be interested in, and be capable of, discussing the technical details of a project. However, in practice this is usually not true. In addition, the quality of a component in the final system is often attributed solely to component quality before integration, ignoring quality improvements by integrators during component integration.

Challenges of the Open Source Component Marketplace in the Industry

“…Several research proposals recognize this problem and have proposed solutions that range from developing a general ontology [6,23], to the use of semantic web technologies [1] and description logics. However, the real applicability of most of these proposals have resulted scarce [15,19]. At this respect, personalization and recommendation functionality in portals are perceived as desirable by industrial reusers (e.g.…”

“…Although research and practitioners have proposed a diverse set of methods and evaluation guidelines for supporting components selection (e.g., [16,17,19]), these proposals have not been widely adopted in the industrial practice [15]. The literature presents various possible explanations for this: that the proposed methods are failing to deal with identification of components and information for evaluating them [4,6], and that it is impractical to perform complete evaluations in terms of time and cost [12].…”

“…The studied sites were identified from the answers of the respondents of the study described in Section 4.2, previous studies e.g. [10,13,15], research team's experience, and web investigation. Of course, we do not claim that we have reviewed all existing portals or search tools of the marketplace, indeed by the nature of the marketplace it is not realistic to think that this can be done.…”

“…With a basis in earlier studies e.g. [10,13,15], we developed and tested an interview guide. It focuses on the experience of industrial Reusers with a finished project in which one or more OSS components were used.…”

“…Furthermore, the interview guide used was prepared based on previous experience with similar studies [10,13,15] and it was pretested both in Spain and in Norway. To make answering as easy as possible for the interviewees, the interviews were performed in their respective native tongues.…”