Towards Improving OSS Products Selection – Matching Selectors and OSS Communities Perspectives

Adopting third-party software is becoming an economical and strategic need for today organizations. A fundamental part of its successful adoption is the informed selection of products that best fit the organization needs. One of the main current problems hampering selection, specially of OSS products is the vast amount of unstructured, incomplete, evolvable and widespread information about products that highly increases the risks of taking a wrong decision. In this paper, we aim to inform and provide evidence to OSS communities that help them to envisage improvements on their information rendering strategies to satisfy industrial OSS selectors’ needs. Our results are from the matching between the informational needs of 23 OSS selectors from diverse software-intensive organizations, and the in-depth study of 9 OSS communities of different sizes and domains. The results evidenced specific areas of improvement that might help to enhance the industrial OSS selection practice.