An Operational Approach for Selecting Open Source Components in a Software Development Project

Many organizations have started to integrate Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) components in their applications. It is therefore crucial for these companies to select the most appropriate F/OSS components in terms of functional and non-functional needs. Although F/OSS selection methods have appeared in the last few years, they lack an operational description. In turn, this has slowed their use in software development project. This work presents an operational approach for selecting F/OSS components where the client, the development team and their respective quality assurance teams are involved in the selection process. Although the case study applying the F/OSS selection approach is left to future work, this article already describes an industrial case where the approach presented in this paper has been approved for use by the various partners, i.e., the client, the development firm and their respective quality teams.