Quality Assurance of Open Source Components: Integrator Point of View

The breakthrough of open source software (OSS) is not only evident when looking at the gradually rising interest in OSS research but also when observing the field of software business. Clearly OSS provides one of many opportunities for companies to speed up their software development and lower its costs. However, there are risks involved in using open source (OS) components such as multitude of licenses and lack of liabilities and information when it comes to the quality of the components. Considering quality it is perilous to include components with questionable quality to software development project. This is particularly true in product family engineering (PFE) and component based software engineering (CBSE), since the effects of low quality are experienced on a larger scale than a single project. Therefore it is imperative to study how commercial companies today perceive and assure the quality of these components in their new context and environment and what are the conceptions of companies about QA in OS communities. The research was conducted by interviewing representatives of nine Finnish IT companies utilizing OS components