Earlier this week at the IKS general assembly I was asked to present a set of industrial validation metrics for the open source software components that IKS is producing.
Being my pragmatic self, I decided to avoid any academic/abstract stuff and focus on concrete metrics that help us provide value-adding solutions to our customers in the long term.
Here’s the result, for a hypothetical FOO software component.
Metrics are numbered VMx to make it clear what we’ll be arguing about when it comes to evaluating IKS software.
- VM1
- Do I understand what FOO is?
- VM2
- Does FOO add value to my product?
- VM3
- Is that added value demonstrable/sellable to my customers?
- VM4
- Can I easily run FOO alongside with or inside my product?
- VM5
- Is the impact of FOO on runtime infrastructure requirements acceptable?
- VM6
- How good is the FOO API when it comes to integrating with my product?
- VM7
- Is FOO robust and functional enough to be used in production at the enterprise level?
- VM8
- Is the FOO test suite good enough as a functionality and non-regression “quality gate”?
- VM9
- Is the FOO licence (both copyright and patents) acceptable to me?
- VM10
- Can I participate in FOO’s development and influence it in a fair and balanced way?
- VM11
- Do I know who I should talk to for support and future development of FOO?
- VM12
- Am I confident that FOO still going to be available and maintained once the IKS funding period is over?
VM1 can be surprisingly hard to fulfill when working on researchy/experimental stuff ;-)
Suggestions for improvements are welcome in this post’s comments, as usual.
Thanks to Alex Conconi who contributed VM11.
