Decision Criteria for Software Component Sourcing Steps towards a Framework

Software developing organizations nowadays have a wide choice when it comes to sourcing software components. This choice ranges from developing or adapting in-house developed components via buying closed source components to utilizing open source components. This study seeks to determine criteria that software developers can use to make this choice. Answering this question will result in a list of criteria that can, after further validation, be used to develop structured decision support in this type of decision. A first step is a literature search resulting in an initial list. Since the literature used was not specifically targeted at the question at hand, it was decided to separately conduct interviews to obtain an independently derived list of criteria. In a second part of the interview the respondents were confronted with the list resulting from literature. Together this resulted in a preliminary proposal for decision criteria for software sourcing.