Comprehensive assessment of open source software ecosystem health

Recent surveys expose that the use of Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly becoming a need for organizations in their development projects. However, deciding a proper OSS to be adopted or to contribute to its development is a complex and error-prone task. Analyzing the OSS ecosystem (OSSECO) h...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Oriol Hilari, Marc|||0000-0003-1928-7024, Müller Cejas, Carlos Guillermo, Marco Gómez, Jordi|||0000-0002-0078-7929, Fernández Montes, Pablo, Franch Gutiérrez, Javier|||0000-0001-9733-8830, Ruiz Cortés, Antonio
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/388706
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/388706
https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.iot.2023.100808
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Open source software
Decision-making
Open Source Software Ecosystem (OSSECO)
Monitoring
Ecosystem health
Programari lliure
Decisió, Presa de
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Enginyeria del software
Descripción
Sumario:Recent surveys expose that the use of Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly becoming a need for organizations in their development projects. However, deciding a proper OSS to be adopted or to contribute to its development is a complex and error-prone task. Analyzing the OSS ecosystem (OSSECO) health may help providing information about: (1) the OSS itself (number of commits, days after the last release, etc.); and (2) their main actors (number of contributors, partners, etc.). There exist proposals that go further and provide aggregated high-level indicators (e.g. visibility as an aggregation of number of community events, number of partners, and other metrics). Nevertheless, there is a lack of useful OSSECO analysis tools to ease the decision making on which OSSECO has the health required by a potential OSS adopter or contributor. In this work, we provide OSS-CARE (OSSeCo heAlthy monitoR and analysEr), an OSS-independent, fully automatic, and real-time framework to assess OSSECO’s health. OSS-CARE supports defining the ecosystem health objectives of potential OSS adopters, OSS contributors, and even OSS managers to inspect their provided health. These objectives are defined based on a well-established model characterizing health metrics that can be potentially aggregated by using a Bayesian network technique. Moreover, the integrated monitoring and analysis components perform an automated assessment of OSSECO’s health by checking the fulfillment of the required health objectives. Furthermore, the result is shown in an appealing dashboard that may ease the complex decision making of which OSS to choose.