Evaluating Open Source Software

How can you confidently determine wether the software you are considering is mature and business ready enough ?

Deciding which software package to adopt inside an organisatiion can be a challenging task. Business Readiness Rating (BRR) is a new proposed standard to facilitate assessment and adoption of Open Source Software (OSS).

The rating model weights the factors that have proven to be most important for successful deployment of OSS.

The BRR process is separated into 4 phases:

1. quick assessment: create a shortlist, filter initially through several suitable indicators: licensing, compliance with standards, referenceable adopters or users, supporting organisation, implementation language, support for internationalisation and localisation, existance of third party reviews and published books, followed by industry analysts such as Gartenr or IDC.
   
2. rank the importance criteria categories and metrics. Select metrics (measurable properties of an OSS project) defined in the 12 assessment categories Functionality, Usability, Quality, Security, Performance, Scalability, Architecture, Support, Documentation, Adoption, Community, Professionalism. Every category is rated on a scale from 1 (unaccaptable) to 5 (excellent). Only a limited number (max 7) of category ratings are used to calculate Business Readiness Rating to reflect the most essential categories of the assessment.
3. process the data. Gather data for each metric used in each category rating.
4. translate the data into the Business Readiness Rating. Use category ratings and the functional orientation weighting factors to calculate the Business Readiness Rating score. The rating is calculated by appropriately weighting a collection of category ratings according to the software's type and usage (mission-critical use, routine use, internal development, or experimentation)
   

The BRR model offers an open framework for software evaluation. BRR aims to accelerate the software evaluation process with a systematic approach, increasing confidence in high-quality open source software.

See OpenBRR.org for tutorials, samples, templates.