Stage 1: Project Best Practices Verification

Introduction	Methodology Overview	Best Practices	Project Attributes	Market Capabilities	Market Readiness

Objective

In our approach, the identification of an open source project's best practices is the first step in evaluating its market readiness. Verifying a project's process and best practices adresses questions such as how is the project managed? does it apply state-of-the-art processes? is it a trustworthy open souce project?

Scope

This stage of the methodology is based on a list of 50 control points. They are essentially drawn from the framework used by the OW2 Technology Council to evaluate project maturity. The checkpoints are grouped in 10 categories defined by their scopes as outlined in the table below.

Best Practices Category	Scope	# Checkpoints
Project Communication	Willingness and ability of the project to communicate, to be easy to deal with.	5
Project Community	Status of the community and mechanisms that support third party contributions.	5
Project Documentation	Documentation facilitating usage of the project and contribution to it.	5
Development Infrastructure	Provisioning of development resources and facilitation of bug reports and commits contribution.	5
Project Management	Organization of the project and management of its activities.	5
Project License	Open source licenses and copyright handling by the project.	5
Development Process	Development practices that help improve code quality.	5
Testing Process	Implementation, quality and maintenance of the testing process.	5
Release Management	Enablement and maintenance of the integrity of the product and its releases.	5
Risk and Vulnerability Management	Attention to security vulnerabilities, mechanisms and resources to deal with them.	5

Data Collection

Information is provided directly by the project leaders in a form listing all best practices under review and asking them to check whether a best practice is applied or not.
Questions are boolean and the form is carefully designed to avoid confusion. Some questions are completed with information boxes for added clarity.
The full list of best practices verified by the methodology and an exemple of the data collection form. 

Computation

Since the questions are boolean, each positive answer brings value 1 and each negative value 0. The 50 best practices control points are grouped in 10 categories of five control points each. Therefore each category can be rated between 0 and 5. With this arrangement, data normalization is trivial since it is embedded into the data collection method.

Results

Results are provided in the shape of a horizontal bar chart rating each best practice category between 0 and 5. The form used to collect data is also published so as to provide details of each category.

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