Modeling and Analyzing Openness Trade-Offs in Software Platforms: A Goal-Oriented Approach

Context and motivation: Open innovation is becoming an important strategy in software development. Following this strategy, software companies are increasingly opening up their platforms to third-party products for extension and completion. Question/problem: Opening up software platforms to third-party applications often involves difficult trade-offs between openness requirements and critical design concerns such as security, performance, privacy, and proprietary ownership. Deliberate assessment of these trade-offs is crucial to the ultimate quality and viability of an open software platform. Principal ideas/results: We propose to treat openness as a distinct class of non-functional requirements, and to model and analyze openness requirements and related trade-offs using a goal-oriented approach. The proposed approach allows to refine and analyze openness requirements in parallel with other competing concerns in designing software platforms. The refined requirements are used as criteria for selecting appropriate design options. We demonstrate our approach using an example of designing an open embedded software platform for the automotive domain reported in the literature. Contributions: The proposed approach allows to balance the fulfillment of interacting requirements in opening up platforms to third-party products, and to determine "good-enough" and "open-enough" platform design strategies.