OP2A: Open Source Product portal assessment

Submitted by qadmin on Mon, 03/14/2011 - 18:44
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Description

OP2A (Open source Product Portal Assessment) is being proposed as a new standard model for assessing the quality of a web portal. The goal is to enable the entire FLOSS community (enterprise adopters and developers) to rate FLOSS Portals in an open and standardized way.

OP2A is currently being used to analyze, monitor and control the portal of a number of Open Source projects, including the Apache Ant, Apache Axis, EclipseJBoss, Linux Kernel and several other Open Source projects.
OP2A is free and Open Source.
OP2A gives companies a trusted, unbiased evaluation model. Moreover developers and web masters can use the checklist to design their web portals with all the contents that are expected to be of interest for FLOSS final users.

Use OP2A to better understand the overall structure of an FLOSS website and use this understanding to improve the information provided as a project developer for maintainer. Open Source project-leads can use OP2A to define a "desired" or "target" level of information provided. This ensures that at a minimum the website will not degrade over time, but as is more likely, will improve with each new release.

Even the home pages of the web portals of well-known FLOSS products show technicalities and details that are not relevant for a fast and effective evaluation of the product’s qualities. So, final users and even developers, who are interested in evaluating and potentially adopting a FLOSS product, are often negatively impressed by the quality perception they have from the web portal of the product and turn to proprietary software solutions or fail to adopt FLOSS that may be useful in their activities.

Download factsheet about trustworthiness in FLOSS products for deeper understading

Download the OP2A factsheet for further information

Pre-conditions and requirements

There are no special requirements for using OP2A. A basic understanding of FLOSS and web navigation is a definite advantage.

Associated documentation

Download

The OP2A checklist, which is the core of the model, can be downloaded here.

Learned lessons

The lessons learned show that it is possible to accurately assess the quality of web portals that expose FLOSS products and projects. Please refer to the available documentation for the specific results. These assessments can be used by FLOSS developers to estimate the quality of their web portals, and also by FLOSS users to chose the best FLOSS product among equivalent solutions.

Maturity Level (1-5)

The maturity of the model would be 4
.

Adjustments in the checklist and in the weights we used for each factor, which composes the checklist, may be necessary. OP2A will be tuned over-time to guarantee an objective assessment of web portals

Contact

Davide Tosi – University of Insubria 

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