EDOS Process Reference Model
| | EDOS Process Reference Model |
|---|
| License | Apache License v2 |
| Forge | Google Forge (to be published September 2007) |
| Contact | Ciaran Bryce, INRIA, Michel Pawlak, Stéphane Laurière |
Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) constitutes a large class of the software used today. It is produced by a self-organizing community with no centralized control. One of the key characteristic of F/OSS is that it guarantees users an access to the sources of produced content (code, documentation, etc.) Depending on the license under which the content is released, F/OSS content users receive the authorization to access these sources, modify them and redistribute the content under specific conditions. All F/OSS projects have to deal with different tasks such as the production of content, its testing, debugging, distribution, documentation, but also with the management of the community, etc. We call F/OSS process the umbrella process gathering all the processes related to the management of these aspects.
The distributed nature of the F/OSS environment and the dependency to a voluntary effort are particular constraints which are unusual to traditional project management. For instance, the success of any F/OSS project directly depends on its ability to foster community involvement and to gather competencies. Further, as community members are volunteers, projects cannot force people to contribute. The high dynamics of the environment also pose problems as content evolves fast, projects appear and also disappear, people join project communities and leave them, which makes knowledge volatile and hard to keep. Projects extend their activities and new ones need to be integrated with existing ones.
Currently, F/OSS project managers lack structures and tools for supporting such specificities which makes them unable to consider the F/OSS process as a whole. Indeed, tools exist for handling some of its aspects such as debugging, testing, distribution, but they are rarely covering these aspects globally. Some effort has been put for integrating them in a common tool or model, however there is no solution nor model providing a global view of the F/OSS environment. Such a solution should enable the description of the activities of a project, the declaration of the resources it uses, the declaration of involved processes, the description of roles and the assignment of tasks in a distributed environment. It should also provide F/OSS projects with support for measuring the F/OSS process, analyzing it, and making it evolve. This situation poses organizational, operational and efficiency problems for large-sized projects but also for small and emerging ones.
EDOS tackles this problem by providing a Process Reference Model (PRM) that captures the activities, roles and resources of the F/OSS process. The model allows reasoning about the coherency and efficiency of the process as a whole. The PRM works on three different levels: descriptive, execution and analysis. The descriptive level describes projects along with all their activities, the resources each activity involves, the processes existing within the project, the way these processes are organized and the different roles existing within the project. It also describes the F/OSS community in terms of competences and interests. The execution level handles tasks assignment to community members. It also enables inter-process communication. Finally, the analysis level provides a means for measuring the F/OSS process through transversal metrics which can be evaluated. The separation of these aspects provides project managers with the ability to clearly describe the internal details of each project, assign responsibilities to the community and analyze obtained results.
The PRM is meant to be the basis for the development of Information Systems adapted to the F/OSS environment. While being primarily designed for providing a means to handle and improve distributed processes such as the F/OSS one, it can however be used to manage any kind of project.
Read more from the final EDOS PRM document:
D5-5-3.
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