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Software components, both Commercial-Off-The-Shelf and Open Source, are being increasingly used in software development. Previous studies have identified typical risks and related risk management strategies for what we will call OTS-based (Off-the-Shelf) development. However, there are few effective and well-proven guidelines to help project managers to identify and manage these risks. We are performing an international state-of-the-practice survey in three countries - Norway, Italy, and Germany - to investigate the relative frequency of typical risks, and the effect of the corresponding risk management methods. Preliminary results show that risks concerning changing requirements and effort estimation are the most frequent risks. Risks concerning traditional quality attributes such as reliability and security of OTS component seem less frequent. Incremental testing and strict quality evaluation have been used to manage the possible negative impact of poor component quality. Realistic effort estimation on OTS quality evaluation helped to mitigate the possible effort estimation biases in OTS component selection and integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an evaluation of a characterisation framework to analyse mobile work scenarios in order to make corresponding software systems. The framework identifies complexity issues to be taken into account when implementing a system. The framework can also be used to elicit requirements from a scenario. Three research questions are investigated in this evaluation: 1) Can the framework be used to identify relevant challenges in the final system? 2) Can the framework be used to identify functional requirements for the final system? and 3) Can the framework be used to identify non-functional requirements for the final system? The evaluation was performed using the framework to analyse and implement an IT-support scenario. The paper also describes a web-tool for this framework that makes the characterisation process simpler. The tool introduces consistency rules to ensure stricter characterisation of the scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using OTS (Off-The-Shelf) components in software projects has become increasing popular in the IT industry. After project managers opt for OTS components, they can decide to use COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) components or OSS (Open Source Software) components instead of building these themselves. This paper describes an empirical study on why project decision-makers use COTS components instead of OSS components, or vice versa. The study was performed in form of an international survey on motivation and risks of using OTS components, conducted in Norway, Italy and Germany. We have currently gathered data on 71 projects using only COTS components and 39 projects using only OSS components, and 5 using both COTS and OSS components. Results show that both COTS and OSS components were used in small, medium and large software houses and IT consulting companies. The overall software system also covers several application domains.Both COTS and OSS were expected to contribute to shorter time-to-market, less development effort and the application of newest technology. However, COTS users believe that COTS component should have good quality, technical support, and will follow the market trend. OSS users care more about the free ownership and openness of the source code. Projects using COTS components had more difficulties in estimating selection effort, following customer requirement changes, and controlling the component's negative effect on system security. On the other hand, OSS user had more difficulties in getting the support reputation of OSS component providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering data management and software configuration management have been evolving fairly independently. On the other hand, it has been observed earlier that many parallels exist [10]. In this paper, we examine the similarities of and differences between EDM and SCM. Many concepts are similar, but there are some differences concerning the objects to be managed. As a consequence, some sophisticated fear tures of modern SCM systems are not applicable in the EDM domain because they are based on assumptions which do not hold there (objects represented as text files, tools operating towards the file system). Some suggestions for further work on version models and on the architecture of version support systems are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]