The breakthrough of open source software (OSS) is not only evident when looking at the gradually rising interest in OSS research but also when observing the field of software business. Clearly OSS provides one of many opportunities for companies to speed up their software development and lower its costs. However, there are risks involved in using open source (OS) components such as multitude of licenses and lack of liabilities and information when it comes to the quality of the components. Considering quality it is perilous to include components with questionable quality to software development project. This is particularly true in product family engineering (PFE) and component based software engineering (CBSE), since the effects of low quality are experienced on a larger scale than a single project. Therefore it is imperative to study how commercial companies today perceive and assure the quality of these components in their new context and environment and what are the conceptions of companies about QA in OS communities. The research was conducted by interviewing representatives of nine Finnish IT companies utilizing OS components

This is a report of a working session on quality in the Working International Conference on Software Architecture, 2005

In order to achieve productive software development with high quality software products, skilled people and effective tools are needed. The concept of qualitydriven software architecture model transformation (QAMT) is concerned with the latter, tools. The ultimate goal of QAMT is to multiply the productivity of individual software modellers with advanced modelling tools. Advanced modelling tools can be used to do most of the work on behalf of the developer. However, QAMT is not a tool, but rather a technique for transforming architecture.

Product line architectures (PLAs) have been under continuous attention in the software research community during the past few years. Although several methods have been established to create PLAs there are not available studies comparing PLA methods. Five methods are known to answer the needs of software product lines: COPA, FAST, FORM, KobrA and QADA. In this paper, an evaluation framework is introduced for comparing PLA design methods. The framework considers the methods from the points of view of method context, user, structure and validation. Comparison revealed distinguishable ideologies between the methods. Therefore, methods do not overlap even though they all are PLA design methods. All the methods have been validated on various domains. The most common domains are telecommunication infrastructure and information domains. Some of the methods apply software standards; at least OMG's MDA for method structures, UML for language and IEEE Std-1471-2000 for viewpoint definitions.

This paper introduces a case study of a driver terminal product family. The terminals are used for fare collection in public transportation. The case study applies the QADA architectural design and analysis method in documenting and evaluating the portability and maintainability of existing architecture. During this case study it was found out how to improve the architectural descriptions of the QADA method for better quality evaluation support. In addition, evaluation revealed risky points of architecture that were improved with separation, compression and abstraction.