Empirical study of open source software selection for adoption, based on software quality characteristics

Currently, open source software (OSS) products have started to become popular in the market as an alternative to traditional proprietary or closed source software. Governments and organizations are beginning to adopt OSS on a large scale and several governmental initiatives have encouraged the use of OSS in the private sector. One major issue for the government and private sector is the selection of appropriate OSS. This paper uses new internal quality characteristics for selecting OSS that can be added to the dimensions of DeLone and McLean information systems' model. Through this study, the quality characteristics are organized in a two level hierarchy, which list characteristics and sub-characteristics that are interconnected with three main dimensions: system quality, information quality and service quality. These characteristic dimensions are tailored to the criteria having been built from literature study and standard for software quality and guidelines. This paper presents case study results of applying the proposed quality characteristic on eight different open source software that are divided between open source network tools and learning management systems.

[1]  Mohamed Sarrab,et al.  The Technical, Non-technical Issues and the Challenges of Migration to Free and Open Source Software , 2013 .

[2]  Laura A Chappell,et al.  Wireshark 101: Essential Skills for Network Analysis , 2013 .

[3]  David M. Nichols,et al.  The Usability of Open Source Software , 2003, First Monday.

[4]  Mohamed Khalefa Sarrab.  Runtime Verification of Information flow: Policy-Based Runtime Verification of Information Flow Control , 2011 .

[5]  Dave A. Thomas.  Going Open Source Software in IT - Opportunities and Challenges , 2005, J. Object Technol..

[6]  Abdalla Gheryani.  Design and Simulation of Wireless Network using NS-2 , 2012 .

[7]  Juan-Carlos Cano,et al.  A survey and comparative study of simulators for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) , 2011, Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput..

[8]  Mohamed Ould-Khaoua,et al.  Impact of NS-2 as FOSS Simulation Tool for Research in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks , 2013 .

[9]  Marcus Ciolkowski,et al.  The QualOSS open source assessment model measuring the performance of open source communities , 2009, ESEM 2009.

[10]  Ephraim R. McLean,et al.  The DeLone and McLean Model of Information Systems Success: A Ten-Year Update , 2003, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[11]  Klaus Wehrle,et al.  A Performance Comparison of Recent Network Simulators , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Communications.

[12]  Teerawat Issariyakul,et al.  Introduction to Network Simulator NS2 , 2008 .

[13]  Mario Gerla,et al.  Deployment and Evaluation of a Wireless Mesh Network , 2009, 2009 Second International Conference on Advances in Mesh Networks.

[14]  Mohamed Sarrab,et al.  Selection criteria of open source software: First stage for adoption , 2013 .

[15]  Hussein Zedan,et al.  Why Moodle , 2008, 2008 12th IEEE International Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems.

[16]  Ephraim R. McLean,et al.  Measuring information systems success: models, dimensions, measures, and interrelationships , 2008, Eur. J. Inf. Syst..

[17]  Ioannis Stamelos,et al.  The SQO-OSS Quality Model: Measurement Based Open Source Software Evaluation , 2008, OSS.