Evaluating Quality of Open Source Components for Reuse-Intensive Commercial Solutions

We present a framework for quality evaluation of open source components adapted to the context of software product lines. The evaluation is done in the context of commercial projects developing multiple solutions that utilise OSS components. The projects need to decide which open source components can be reused for a specific purpose, or whether it is better to develop the needed functionality in-house. We introduce a set of quality criteria to be used in the evaluation and discuss them with different levels of risk tolerance in the commercial projects. We also limit to the most useful criteria considering the effort and relevance of the criteria. Finally, we present how the evaluation steps correspond to the general stages of Software Product Line creation and report findings from the framework usage.

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