Accommodating openness requirements in software platforms: A goal-oriented approach

Abstract

Open innovation is becoming an important strategy in software development. Following this strategy, software companies are increasingly opening up their platforms to third-party products. However, opening up software platforms to third-party applications raises serious concerns about critical quality requirements, such as security, performance, privacy and proprietary ownership. Adopting appropriate openness design strategies, which fulfill open-innovation objectives while maintaining quality requirements, calls for deliberate analysis of openness requirements from early on in opening up software platforms. We propose to treat openness as a distinct class of non-functional requirements, and to refine and analyze it in parallel with other design concerns using a goal-oriented approach. We extend the Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) analysis method with a new set of catalogues for specifying and refining openness requirements in software platforms. We apply our approach to revisit the design of data provision service in two real-world open software platforms and discuss the results.