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)

Paper published in Computación y Sistemas

Open Framework For Web Service Selection Using Multimodal and Configurable Techniques

Oscar Jair Cabrera Bejar, Marc Oriol Hilari, Xavier Franch, Jordi Marco, Lidia López, Olivia Fragoso, René Santaolaya

Abstract. Services as part of our daily life represent an important mean to deliver value to their consumers and have a great economic impact for organizations. The service consumption and their exponential proliferation show the importance and acceptance by their customers. In this sense, it is possible to predict that the infrastructure of future cities will be supported by different kind of services, such as, smart city services, open data services, as well as common services (e.g., e-mail services), etc. Nowadays a large percentage of services are provided on the Web commonly called web services (WS). This kind of services have become one the most used technologies in software systems. Among the challenges when integrating web services in a given system, requirements-driven selection occupies a prominent place. A comprehensive selection process needs to check compliance of Non-functional Requirements (NFR), which can be assessed by analyzing the Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, we describe a framework called WeSSQoS that aims at ranking available WS based on the comparison of their QoS and the stated NFR. The framework is designed as an open Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that hosts a configurable portfolio of normalization procedures and ranking algorithms that can be selected by users when starting a selection process. The QoS data from WS can be obtained either from a static, WSDL-like description, or dynamically through monitoring techniques. WeSSQoS is designed to work over multiple WS repositories and QoS sources. The impact of having a portfolio of different normalization and ranking algorithms is illustrated with an example.

RISCOSS Convention 2014

The RISCOSS Convention held in OW2con14 in Paris. Gathering feedback from potential users.

Nomination for the Best Paper Award in ER 2014

Our paper Modelling and Applying OSS Adoption Strategies was nominated to the best paper award!!!