 | What is the point of RISCOSS for organisation implementing Open Source?
Basically, the point of RISCOSS is that we try to attach a bridge between the technical platform and the decisional level. A company that wants to adopt open source technologies needs to be able to leverage the decision made at the technical level - different releases that communicate and different licences to reconcile - to a decisional level ; so that the project manager can take the right decisions. In a large ecosystem, he needs to handle the complexity of several projects with different components. |
How was born the idea of RISCOSS?
It was not an idea that we put forward. The project has been triggered by a couple of industrial partners. They needed to improve their way of working and asked how could we do it. We articulated the whole project around this idea. RISCOSS is an industrial project-driven European project. There are a lot of scientific work in it and we want to integrate as many assistant techniques as possible. But we also want to provide a strategic view to help define a modeling infrastructure that help identify ecosystem conflicts, dependancies or even partners for a particular project.
What kind of projects will cover RISCOSS?
We’re not covering 100% types of projects but we have a large spectrum in the consortium. Having a large company like Ericsson, a small community like Moodbile.org, a larger one like OW2, that’s what we were looking from. This allows us to see the peculiarities of organisations and their projects. We will check the problematic that they may have and how can we help them.
How will you help OSS users secure their own projects?
If we have enough data, based on statistical analysis or, if not, in qualitative reasoning, we’ll try to establish correlation between the decision that have been made and the number of bugs reported, among other consequences. OW2, XWiki and Cenatic will provide us a lot of data which represent a lot of opportunities. I find more interresting to exploit these data than to invent another technique for tracking dependancies in the components.
A word on Xavier Franch, RISCOSS Project Leader
 | Associate professor. PhD and Msc. in Informatics, UPC. Main investigator of the GESSI group. Active researcher with more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, his interests includes Component-Based Software Engineering (OSS and COTS), Requirements Engineering, Software Quality, Software Architecture, Software Process Modelling, among others. He has participated in European projects and coordinated various technology-transfer actions. In FP7, he acted as coordinator of the UPC associate node in the S-Cube Network of Excellence. He has served and is being serving as Program Chair or General Chair of conferences as RE, CAiSE, REFSQ, and many others. He is editorial board member of the Elsevier IST Journal. He has won several best papers awards.
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