OTS-Wiki: A Web Community for Fostering Evaluation and Selection of Off-The-Shelf Software Components

Abstract

Many challenges arises when it comes to the selection of Off-The-Shelf (OTS) software components to use in software development. To make the selection process easier, other users experience on working out similar tasks could be of great value. Such experience data concerning the selection, the use, and the integration of a component is rarely available. In this Master thesis we describe the implementation of OTS-Wiki, which is a wiki based portal with community driven content. OTS-Wiki is a web community fostering evaluation and selection of OTS software components. The wiki provides basic functionality to support the process of evaluating and selecting components for use in component-based software development. The success of OTS-Wiki relies heavily on the quality and relevance of the content populating the repository. The are also usually related heavy start-up costs to such a repository. A wiki based portal, based on the open source collaboration principle, where the users themselves controls and populates the repository could be the solution to both these issues. Keywords: Community Driven, Component Evaluation, Component Selection, Off-The-Shelf, Open Source, OTS, OTS-Wiki, Social Computing, Web Communities, Web Technology, Wiki