State of the art and practice of open source component integration

The open source software (OSS) development approach has become a remarkable option to consider for cost-efficient, high quality software development. Utilizing OSS as part of an in-house software application requires the software company to take the role of a component integrator. In addition, integrating OSS as part of in-house software has a few differences compared to integrating closed source software and in-house software, such as access to source code and the fact that OSS evolves differently than closed source software. This paper describes the current state of the art and practice of open source integration techniques. The main observations are that the lack of documentation and heterogeneity of platforms are problems that neither the state of the art or practice could solve. In addition, although literature provides techniques and methods for predicting and solving both architecture and component level integration problems, these were not used in practice. Instead, companies relied on experience and rules of thumb.

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