Abstract—An international survey on risk management in software development with Off-the-Shelf (OTS) components is reported upon and discussed. The survey investigated actual risk-management activities and their correlations with the occurrences of typical risks in OTS component-based development. Data from 133 software projects in Norway, Italy, and Germany were collected using a stratified random sample of IT companies. The results show that OTS components normally do not contribute negatively to the quality of the software system as a whole, as is commonly expected. However, issues such as the underestimation of integration effort and inefficient debugging remain problematic and require further investigation. The results also illustrate several promising effective riskreduction activities, e.g., putting more effort into learning relevant OTS components, integrating unfamiliar components first, thoroughly evaluating the quality of candidate OTS components, and regularly monitoring the support capability of OTS providers. Five hypotheses are proposed regarding these risk-reduction activities. The results also indicate that several other factors, such as project, cultural, and human-social factors, have to be investigated to thoroughly deal with the possible risks of OTS-based projects. Index Terms—Software engineering/reusable software, software engineering/management, software engineering/software engineering process.

The main research interest in Open Source Software (OSS) has been in answering the questions of why individuals and organizations without economic compensation contribute to OSS projects and how these projects are organized. In this paper we instead focus on managerial decisions for acquisition of OSS and discuss potential barriers for widespread use of OSS. Based on existing literature and a small case study, we develop and discuss the hypothesis that a major barrier may be the “customer” organizations’ uncertainty and unfamiliarity with the relationships with OSS “vendors”. To develop viable models for these relationships is an important challenge, which we will deal with in a research project, of which this paper should be seen as a first step.

Lately we have seen a growing interest from both public and private organisations to adopt Open Source Software (OSS), not only for a few, specific applications but also on a more general level throughout the organisation. As a consequence, the organisations ’ decisions on adoption of OSS are becoming increasingly more important and complex. We present three perspectives organisations can employ in their decisions: seeing OSS acquisition as a business case, as COTS acquisition, and as architectural change within a governance framework. We present case studies of decisions on OSS adoption, and categorise the decision criteria we have found. Our results indicate that for large-scale adoption of OSS, focus will be on architectural considerations: enterprise-wide architectures will at first be a barrier, but in the long term OSS’s support of open standards can be a major enabler for OSS adoption. In contrast, in smaller organisations and in small-scale adoption of OSS, the cheap price of OSS is a major enabler, as it provides a good opportunity for experiments and short-term economic benefits. For small organisations these experiments can lead to development of a common IT-architecture, and in larger organisations OSS can be adopted in niche-areas, without significantly

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