A case study of internetware development

Abstract

The open, dynamic and ever-changing characteristics of Internet have attracted much attention to carry out research on Internetware. Current researches mainly focus on the framework of the Internetware. However, there are a variety of issues facing the Internetware development today with more joint work distributed over the world, and how should we improve the efficiency of such development? In order to resolve this issue we investigate three open source projects from J2EE platform domain: JBossAS, JOnAS, and Apache Geronimo to find out that, in the sampled projects, how many people will involve the Internetware development, how they allocate the work, and how the speed to resolve the issues reported by the customer. By answering five research questions referred from the Apache study, we proposed four hypotheses: (1) Open source Interware development will have a core of developers who will create approximately 80% or more of the new functionality. The group will be no larger than 30 people; (2) In a specific server-side domain, the group who will repair defects and report issues will have the equal or even smaller number people compared to the core group; (3) Commercial support can attract more volunteers to the open source Internetware projects; (4) Open Source Internetware developments exhibit very rapid responses to customer issues.