RISCOSS reveals opportunities and risks at both technical and business levels


Apr 28 2014

Interview: Angelo Susi, Researcher in Fondazione Bruno Kessler

How would you present the collaborative project?

RISCOSS is a collaborative project for the identification and management of risks in open source where the analysis of ecosystem is crucial in order to better understand the OSS context and to exploit the social network peculiarities of the OSS world to identify and mitigate risks.

What is your role in the project?

I am the scientific manager of the project and the leader of work package 2 that has the objective of proposing techniques and methods for OSS risk identification and management. I work in the Fondazione Bruno Kessler, an information technology research institute in Trento, Italy. As a researcher in FBK, my main interests and those of my group composed by Daniel Gross, Mirko Morandini and Alberto Siena, are in the Software engineering field, in particular in requirements engineering, conceptual modelling and search based software engineering. RISCOSS is a great opportunity to continue our work in these fields and to apply our research findings in the field of OSS risks.

What key innovation do you bring or help to develop?

We aim at exploiting two main techniques that are part of the background knowledge in our group: the conceptual modelling and the search based techniques and algorithms. Conceptual modelling is one of the methods to represent the OSS ecosystem and the related risks. The search-based techniques are the means to analyse the risk models and to identify possible mitigation actions. The nature of the risk makes the use of these techniques challenging because of the lack or uncertainty of data.

How will the RISCOSS platform improve the Open Source-based software development lifecycle?

One of the major objectives of RISCOSS is the improvement of the level of awareness of opportunities and risks in the adoption and development of OSS software at both technical and business levels. Of particular interest for RISCOSS are all the criteria, such as security, licensing, code quality, costs or client satisfaction that are crucial for an organisation when it has to decide about the adoption of a particular OSS component or, more generally, of the Open Source philosophy.

A word on Angelo Susi, Researcher in Fondazione Bruno Kessler
http://www.riscoss.eu/bin/download/About/Contact/Angelo_Susi_h350.jpg
Angelo Susi is a researcher at the Software Engineering research unit, FBK-CIT. His research interests are in the fields of Requirements Engineering, Agent-oriented Software Engineering, Requirements Engineering, and Machine Learning. Angelo Susi is participating to the program committee of international conferences and workshops, and acting as reviewer for journals in these areas. He served as general chair of SSBSE 2012, organization chair of ICSM 2012, and ISSTA 2010, and financial chair of IEEE RE’11. He has been primary investigator and leader of research projects. He acts as scientific manager of the EU FP7 project RISCOSS.