Evaluating Open Source Software through Prototyping

Abstract

The increasing number of high quality open source software (OSS) components lets industrial organizations seriously consider integrating them into their software solutions for critical business cases. But thorough considerations have to be undertaken to choose the “right” OSS component for a specific business case. OSS components need to fulfill specific functional and non-functional requirements, must fit into a planned architecture, and must comply with context factors in a specific environment. This chapter introduces a prototyping approach to evaluate OSS components. The prototyping approach provides decision makers with context-specific evaluation results and a prototype for demonstration purposes. The approach can be used by industrial organizations to decide on the feasibility of OSS components in their concrete business cases. We present one of the industrial case studies we conducted in a practical course at the University of Kaiserslautern to demonstrate the application of our approach in practice. This case study shows that even inexperienced developers like students can produce valuable evaluation results for an industrial customer that wants to use open source components.