Evaluating Open Source Software

This talk describes an approach to quantitatively evaluate the quality and maturity of open source software. and hence its suitability for use in business-critical settings. We have defined seven different evaluation categories, along with an evaluation process that allows a user to allocate weights to the various categories and to easily select the most appropriate software projects for further evaluation. The evaluation process relies heavily on data that can be extracted from open source forges and from other online resources. The goal of this work is to assist people in selecting open source software for use in business-critical settings.

Speaker Details

Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman is a Professor of Software Management Practice at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, and the Executive Director of its Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI), focused on evaluation and adoption of open source software. In 1980, as a Professor at UC San Francisco, he released the software for his User Software Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman is a Professor of Software Management Practice at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, and the Executive Director of its Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI), focused on evaluation and adoption of open source software. In 1980, as a Professor at UC San Francisco, he released the software for his User Software Engineering research project under a BSD license. Subsequently, as CEO of Interactive Development Environments (IDE), he incorporated some of that software in IDE’s Software through Pictures multiuser modeling environment, released in 1984, making it among the very first commercial products to include open source software. After IDE, Tony was VP of Engineering for a dot-com, and later became VP of Bluestone Software, where Bluestone’s open source Total-e-Mobile toolkit allowed mobile devices to connect to JavaEE web applications. Tony is very active in the international open source research community, and served as General Chair of the 2009 Int’l. Conf. on Open Source Systems. He is on the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Board of Advisors of Open Source for America Tony is a Fellow of the ACM and a Life Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to software engineering and software development environments. He received the 2012 Distinguished Educator Award from the IEEE’s Technical Council on Software Engineering and the 2013 Influential Educator Award from the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering. Tony has been to more than 65 countries, including some that no longer exist, and posts his photos on Flickr.