My first paper in a journal indexed in the JCR!!!!!

to appear in...

Data & Knowledge Engineering Journal

Adoption of OSS components: a goal-oriented approach 

Lidia López, Dolors Costal, Claudia P. Ayala, Xavier Franch, Maria Carmela Annosi, Ruediger Glott, Kirsten Haaland

Abstract: Open Source Software (OSS) has become a strategic asset for a number of reasons, such as short time-to-market software delivery, reduced development and maintenance costs, and its customization capabilities. Therefore, organizations are increasingly becoming OSS adopters, either as a result of a strategic decision or because it is almost unavoidable nowadays, given the fact that most commercial software also relies at some extent in OSS infrastructure. The way in which organizations adopt OSS affects and shapes their businesses. Therefore, knowing the impact of different OSS adoption strategies in the context of an organization may help improving the processes undertaken inside this organization and ultimately pave the road to strategic moves. In this paper, we propose to model OSS adoption strategies using a goal-oriented notation, in which different actors state their objectives and dependencies on each other. These models describe the consequences of adopting one such strategy or another: which are the strategic and operational goals that are supported, which are the resources that emerge, etc. The models rely on an OSS ontology, built upon a systematic literature review, which comprises the activities and resources that characterise these strategies. Different OSS adoption strategy models arrange these ontology elements in diverse ways. In order to assess which is the OSS adoption strategy that better fits the organization needs, the notion of model coverage is introduced, which allows to measure the degree of concordance among every strategy with the model of the organization by comparing the respective models. The approach is illustrated with an example of application in a big telecommunications company.

Paper accepted at 34th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2015)

Aligning Business Goals and Risks in OSS Adoption

Dolors Costal, Lidia López, Mirko Morandini, Alberto Siena, Maria Carmela  Annosi, Daniel Gross, Lucía Méndez, Xavier Franch, Angelo Susi

Abstract Increasing adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) requires a change in the organizational culture and reshaping IT decision-makers mindset. Adopting OSS software components introduces some risks that can affect the adopter organization’s business goals, therefore they need to be considered. To assess these risks, it is required to understand the socio-technical structures that interrelate the stakeholders in the OSS ecosystem, and how these structures may propagate the potential risks to them. In this paper, we study the connection between OSS adoption risks and OSS adopter organizations’ business goals. We propose a model-based approach and analysis framework that combines two existing frameworks: the i* framework to model and reason about business goals, and the RiskML notation to represent and analyse OSS adoption risks. We illustrate our approach with data drawn from an industrial partner organisation in a joint EU project. Jointly with Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Italy) and Ericsson Telecomunicazioni S.p.A. (Italy)