Exploring Factors and Metrics to Select Open Source Software Components for Integration: An Empirical Study

TL;DR

This study identifies key factors and metrics used by practitioners to select open source software components, evaluates the availability of information from portals, and discusses automation possibilities for OSS selection.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive set of factors, sub-factors, and metrics for OSS selection, and analyzes the extent of automation feasible via portal APIs.

Findings

Identified 8 main factors and 74 sub-factors for OSS selection.

Out of 170 metrics, only 40 are available, and 22 are accessible for all projects.

Only a small part of factors can be evaluated automatically.

Abstract

[Context] Open Source Software (OSS) is nowadays used and integrated in most of the commercial products. However, the selection of OSS projects for integration is not a simple process, mainly due to a of lack of clear selection models and lack of information from the OSS portals. [Objective] We investigate the factors and metrics that practitioners currently consider when selecting OSS. We also investigate the source of information and portals that can be used to assess the factors, as well as the possibility to automatically extract such information with APIs. [Method] We elicited the factors and the metrics adopted to assess and compare OSS performing a survey among 23 experienced developers who often integrate OSS in the software they develop. Moreover, we investigated the APIs of the portals adopted to assess OSS extracting information for the most starred 100K projects in GitHub. [Result] We identified a set consisting of 8 main factors and 74 sub-factors, together with 170 related metrics that companies can use to select OSS to be integrated in their software projects. Unexpectedly, only a small part of the factors can be evaluated automatically, and out of 170 metrics, only 40 are available, of which only 22 returned information for all the 100K projects. Therefore, we recommend project maintainers and project repositories to pay attention to provide information for the project they are hosting, so as to increase the likelihood of being adopted [Conclusion] OSS selection can be partially automated, by extracting the information needed for the selection from portal APIs. OSS producers can benefit from our results by checking if they are providing all the information commonly required by potential adopters...