Adoption of Open Source Processes in Large Enterprises

18.2.1 Trust

Some interviewee distinguished between internal OSS development and external OSS to be adopted by the company. The answers were mainly interested on the importance of the quality of the source code and the final product first, and only then the interviewee expected additional quality issues. The quality of the OS product is based on its utility to the company and on a list of other criteria. The most often mentioned elements that assure the quality of an OS product are (Figure 1):

• •

  A quality software development process

• •

  The availability and a prompt implementation of the roadmap

• •

  Explicative documentation and possibly some examples of the use

• •

  The product has to be tested appropriately by developers and other users (a large user base)

• •

  Some companies prefer a third party assessment (a major certification authority) of the product and sometimes also of the process that was followed for the development of the final product; however, this assessment may be also performed or replaced by previous use experiences of trusted partners like providers, or even competitors.

• •

  The community developing the product has to use version control systems, bug tracking, mailing lists and other OS development tools in order to permit a clear assessment of their development process.

• •

  The community has to be still active on the improvement of the product and promptly responsive to user’s questions

• •

  The license of the product must be in accordance with the use that the company needs it for.

  Figure 1.

  Trust elements

  

OS product must provide all functionalities that the company needs and these functionalities must have a good quality level. Some interviewee answered that an additional quality criteria for OS products is the list of (important) companies that support and sponsor the development of the OS product.