A2 Tool For Sony Ericsson Free Download
Kathryn Garivay
Despite growing interest of Open Innovation (OI) in Software Engineering (SE), little is known about what triggers software organizations to adopt it and how this affects SE practices. OI can be realized in numerous of ways, including Open Source Software (OSS) involvement. Outcomes from OI are not restricted to product innovation but also include process innovation, e.g. improved SE practices and methods. This study explores the involvement of a software organization (Sony Mobile) in OSS communities from an OI perspective and what SE practices (requirements engineering and testing) have been adapted in relation to OI. It also highlights the innovative outcomes resulting from OI. An exploratory embedded case study investigates how Sony Mobile use and contribute to Jenkins and Gerrit; the two central OSS tools in their continuous integration tool chain. Quantitative analysis was performed on change log data from source code repositories in order to identify the top contributors and triangulated with the results from five semi-structured interviews to explore the nature of the commits. The findings of the case study include five major themes: i) The process of opening up towards the tool communities correlates in time with a general adoption of OSS in the organization. ii) Assets not seen as competitive advantage nor a source of revenue are made open to OSS communities, and gradually, the organization turns more open. iii) The requirements engineering process towards the community is informal and based on engagement. iv) The need for systematic and automated testing is still in its infancy, but the needs are identified. v) The innovation outcomes included free features and maintenance, and were believed to increase speed and quality in development. Adopting OI was a result of a paradigm shift of moving from Windows to Linux. This shift enabled Sony Mobile to utilize the Jenkins and Gerrit communities to make their internal development process better for its software developers and testers.
Open Source Software (OSS) was widely used by software organizations before the OI model became popular (Lee et al. 2009) and nowadays provides a common example of OI (Munir et al. 2016). OSS leverages external resources and knowledge to increase innovation, product quality and to shorter time-to-market. OSS offers not only potential product innovation (e.g. by using an OSS platform of commodity parts to build differentiation parts), but potential process innovations in terms of an implementation of new or significantly improved production or delivery methods (Linker et al. 2015).
Software organizations that want to benefit from OI via OSS engagement need to adapt and innovate their internal software development strategies and processes. For example, influence on feature selection and road-mapping may be gained through a more active participation, as many OSS communities are based on meritocracy principles (Jensen and Scacchi 2007). Also, some benefits may first be fully utilized after contributing back certain parts to the OSS community (Ven and Mannaert 2008). For example, by correcting bugs, actively participating in discussions and contributing new features, a software organization might reduce maintenance cost compared to proprietary software development (Stuermer et al. 2009). Hence, in order for a firm to gain the expected benefits of products, OI process innovations may be a required step on the way forward (Lakhani and von Hippel 2003; Wnuk et al. 2012; Rolandsson et al. 2011). Existing literature does not particularly focus on how these internal SE process adaptions should be structured or executed (Munir et al. 2016). Further, little is known about how OSS involvement may be utilized as an enabler and support for further innovation spread inside an organization, e.g. process, tools, or organizational innovations.
This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 highlights the related work and Section 3 outlines the research methodology. In Sections 4 and 5 results from the quantitative and qualitative analysis are presented, respectively. Finally, Section 6 discussed the results, followed by conclusions in Section 7.
In this section, we summarize related work in OI strategies, OI challenges in SE and open source development practices inside software organizations. This section is partly based on the systematic mapping study by Munir et al. (2014).
West and Wood (2008) examined the complex ecosystem surrounding Symbian Ltd. and identified three inherent difficulties for organizations leading an OI ecosystem: 1) prioritizing the conflicting needs of heterogeneous ecosystem participants, 2) knowing the ecosystem requirements for a product that has yet to be created, and 3) balancing the interests of those participants against those of the ecosystem leader.
selectively revealing - differentiating parts are kept internal while commodity parts are made open (Henkel 2006; West 2003). This requires continuous assessment of what parts are to be considered commodity as opposed to differentiating value.
Henkel (2006) reports how small organizations reveal more, as they are likely to benefit from the external development support. Component manufacturers also reported to contribute a lot as they have a good protection of the hardware they sell; software is seen as a complementary asset. In a follow-up study, Henkel et al. (2014) further reported how openness had become a competitive edge, as customers had started to request even more revealing.
Inner Source (Stol et al. 2014) has gained interest among researchers and practitioners as a way to adapt OSS practices at software organizations. Such hybrids of commercial and OSS practices (Mockus and Herbsleb 2002) could include using the OSS style project structure, where a core team of recognized experts has the power to commit code to an official release, and a much larger group contributes voluntarily in many ways.
This paper adds to existing knowledge by focusing on the use of OSS from an OI perspective in an organization that seek to complement its internal product development and process innovation (Linker et al. 2015) with the use of external knowledge from OSS communities. Furthermore, this study aims to improve our understanding of what and how a software organization can open up and how SE practices are adapted to deal with the openness to OSS communities.
Below we describe the research design of this study. We explain the research questions, the structure of the case study design, and the methodologies used for data collection as well as for the quantitative and qualitative analysis.
The Jenkins and Gerrit OSS communities surrounded by Sony Mobile and other members. Arrows represent knowledge transfer in and out of the community members such as other software organizations, non profit organizations (NPO) and individuals, which in turn are illustrated by funnels, commonly used in OI literature (Chesbrough 2003)
The study further investigates how external knowledge and innovation captured through the development of these OSS tools, may be transferred into the product development teams of Sony Mobile. More explicitly, this study contributes by studying how OSS may be used, not only for leveraging product innovation (Linker et al. 2015) in the tools themselves, but also how these tools can be used as enablers for process innovation in the form of improved SE practices and tools within the organization.
Jenkins is an open source build server that runs on a standard servlet container e.g. Apache Tomcat. It can handle Maven and Ant instructions, as well as execute custom batch and bash scripts. It was forked from the Hudson build server in 2010 due to a dispute between Oracle and the rest of the community.
Gerrit code review is an OSS code review tool created by Google in connection with the Android project in 2007. It is tightly integrated with the software configuration management tool GIT, working as a gatekeeper, i.e. a commit needs to be reviewed and verified before it is allowed to be merged into the main branch.
Sony Mobile is a multinational corporation with roughly 5,000 employees, developing embedded devices. The studied branch focuses on developing Android-based phones and tablets and has 1600 employees, of which 900 are directly involved in software development. Sony Mobile develops software in an agile fashion and applies software product line management with a database of more than 20,000 features suggested or implemented across all product lines (Pohl et al. 2005).
However, in order to work with OSS communities, namely Jenkins and Gerrit Sony Mobile created a designated tools department to acquire and integrate the external knowledge to improve the internal continuous integration process. The continuous integration tool chain used by Sony Mobile is developed, maintained and supported by an internal tools department. The teams working on phones and tablets are thereby relieved of this technical overhead. During the recent years, Sony Mobile has transitioned from passive usage of the Android codebase into active involvement and community contribution with many code commits to Jenkins and Gerrit. This maturity resulted in a transition from closed innovation to OI (Chesbrough 2003), assuming that business values are created or captured as an effect.
From an OI perspective, there are interactions between the Tools department and the Jenkins and Gerrit communities (see Fig. 2). The in- and outgoing transactions, visualized by the arrows in Fig. 2, are data and information flows, e.g. ideas, support and commits, can be termed as a coupled innovation process (Enkel et al. 2009). The exchange is continuous and bi-directional, and brings product innovation into the Tools department in the form of new features and bug fixes to Jenkins and Gerrit.
The Tools department can, in turn, be seen as a gate between external knowledge and the other parts of Sony Mobile (see Fig. 2). The Tools department accesses, adapts and integrates the externally obtained knowledge from the Jenkins and Gerrit communities into the product development teams of Sony Mobile. This creates additional transactions inside Sony Mobile which can be labeled as process innovation (OECD 2005) in the sense that new tools and ways of working improve development efficiency and quality. This relates to the internal complementary assets need that is mentioned as an area for future research by Chesbrough et al. (2006).
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