@proceedings {1447, title = {OSS Integration Issues and Community Support: An Integrator Perspective}, volume = {378}, year = {2012}, month = {09/2012}, pages = {129-143}, publisher = {IFIP AICT}, abstract = {The reuse and integration of Open Source Software (OSS) components provided by OSS communities is becoming an economical and strategic need for today{\textquoteright}s organizations. The integration of OSS components provides many benefits, but also risks and challenges. One of the most important risks is the lack of effective and timely OSS community support for dealing with possible integration problems. For gaining an understanding of the common problems that organizations face when integrating OSS components, and the role played by OSS communities, we performed an exploratory study on 25 OSS integration projects from different European organizations. The results show that the main way of reducing integration problems was the use of OSS components from well-established communities; therefore very few integration problems were identified. In most of the cases these problems were successfully solved with the support from the OSS community and/or colleagues. In addition, contrary to the common belief that understanding code from someone else is a hard and undesirable task, some integrators consider OSS code even more understandable than their own code.}, author = {Ayala, Claudia and Cruzes, Daniela S. and Nguyen, Anh Duc and Conradi, Reidar and Franch, Xavier and Höst, Martin and Ali Babar, Muhammad} } @article {1383, title = {A comparative study of challenges in integrating Open Source Software and Inner Source Software}, journal = {Information and Software Technology}, volume = {53}, year = {2011}, month = {12/2011}, pages = {1319 - 1336}, abstract = {Context Several large software-developing organizations have adopted Open Source Software development (OSSD) practices to develop in-house components that are subsequently integrated into products. This phenomenon is also known as {\textquotedblleft}Inner Source{\textquotedblright}. While there have been several reports of successful cases of this phenomenon, little is known about the challenges that practitioners face when integrating software that is developed in such a setting. Objective The objective of this study was to shed light on challenges related to building products with components that have been developed within an Inner Source development environment. Method Following an initial systematic literature review to generate seed category data constructs, we performed an in-depth exploratory case study in an organization that has a significant track record in the implementation of Inner Source. Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with participants from a range of divisions across the organization. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using qualitative data analysis techniques. Results We have identified a number of challenges and approaches to address them, and compared the findings to challenges related to development with OSS products reported in the literature. We found that many challenges identified in the case study could be mapped to challenges related to integration of OSS. Conclusion The results provide important insights into common challenges of developing with OSS and Inner Source and may help organizations to understand how to improve their software development practices by adopting certain OSSD practices. The findings also identify the areas that need further research. Highlights ► We performed a case study that has adopted Open Source development practices. ► We studied the challenges encountered and approaches taken by the organization. ► We performed a systematic review to identify challenges related to Open Source. ► We compared the findings from the review to the findings from the case study. ► Most identified challenges could be mapped to the findings from the literature.}, keywords = {Open Source Software; Inner Source; Software development; Challenges; Case study; Empirical studies}, issn = {09505849}, doi = {10.1016/j.infsof.2011.06.007}, url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095058491100142X}, author = {Stol, Klaas-Jan and Ali Babar, Muhammad and Avgeriou, Paris and Fitzgerald, Brian} } @proceedings {1279, title = {The Importance of Architectural Knowledge in Integrating Open Source Software}, year = {2011}, month = {10/2011}, pages = {142-158}, publisher = {Springer}, abstract = {Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly used in Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) of large software systems. An important issue in CBSD is selection of suitable components. Various OSS selection methods have been proposed, but most of them do not consider the software architecture aspects of OSS products. The Software Architecture (SA) research community refers to a product{\textquoteright}s architectural information, such as design decisions and underlying rationale, and used architecture patterns, as Architecture Knowledge (AK). In order to investigate the importance of AK of OSS components in integration, we conducted an exploratory empirical study. Based on in-depth interviews with 12 IT professionals, this paper presents insights into the following questions: 1) what AK of OSS is needed? 2) Why is AK of OSS needed? 3) Is AK of OSS generally available? And 4) what is the relative importance of AK? Based on these new insights, we provide a research agenda to further the research field of software architecture in OSS.}, keywords = {architectural knowledge, component-based development, Open Source Software integration, OSS Integrator, software architecture, Survey}, author = {Stol, Klaas-Jan and Ali Babar, Muhammad and Avgeriou, Paris} } @conference {602, title = {A Joint Workshop of QACOS and OSSPL}, booktitle = {OSS2009: Open Source Ecosystems: Diverse Communities Interacting (IFIP 2.13)}, series = {IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology }, volume = {299/2009}, year = {2009}, month = {2009///}, pages = {357 - 358}, publisher = {Springer}, organization = {Springer}, chapter = {34}, abstract = {The OSS movement, which originated from a pragmatic need to share code among individuals, has grown to become a major force behind inter-organizational reuse of platforms, components and code. The use of open source software to build single or family of systems (i.e., product line development) appears to be a profitable way to quality software products. On the other hand, because of the diverse use of open source software, product line development is an attractive way of working in open source communities. The configuration mechanisms used in open source communities may be applicable within software product lines variability management. In addition, product line organizations are usually involved in distributed development, which works very efficiently within open source communities, leading to high quality products. However, at present, there is limited interaction between the open source and product line development communities. }, issn = {978-3-642-02031-5}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02032-2_34}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/Joint\%20Workshop\%20of\%20QACOS.pdf}, author = {Ali Babar, Muhammad and Lundell, Bj{\"o}rn and van der Linden, Frank} } @conference {583, title = {Reporting Empirical Research in Open Source Software: The State of Practice}, booktitle = {OSS2009: Open Source Ecosystems: Diverse Communities Interacting (IFIP 2.13)}, series = {IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology }, volume = {299/2009}, year = {2009}, month = {2009///}, pages = {156 - 169}, publisher = {Springer}, organization = {Springer}, chapter = {15}, abstract = {Background: The number of reported empirical studies of Open Source Software (OSS) has continuously been increasing. However, there has been no effort to systematically review the state of the practice of reporting empirical studies of OSS with respect to the recommended standards of performing and reporting empirical studies in software engineering. It is important to understand, how to report empirical studies of OSS in order to make them useful for practitioners and researchers. Research aim: The aim of our research is to gain insights in the state of the practice of reporting empirical studies of OSS in order to identify the gaps to be filled for improving the quality of evidence being provided for OSS. Method: To that end, we decided to systematically review the empirical studies of OSS. A total of 63 papers reporting empirical studies were selected from the four editions of the Proceedings of the International Conference on Open Source Systems. The data were extracted and synthesised from the selected papers for analysis. Results and conclusions: We have found that the quality of the reported OSS-related empirical studies needs to be significantly improved. Based on the results of our systematic review and general principles of reporting good empirical research, we present a set of guidelines for reporting OSS-related empirical studies. The suggested guidelines are expected to help the research community to improve the quality of reported studies. }, issn = {978-3-642-02031-5}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02032-2_15}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/Reporting\%20Empirical\%20Research.pdf}, author = {Stol, Klaas-Jan and Ali Babar, Muhammad} }