The use of reference process models to capture open source migration activities

Abstract

South Africa has shown an increased interest and awareness of Open Source Software (OSS) in the past decade. One of the reasons for this was the support from the Shuttleworth Foundation for Open Source initiatives. Migrating to OSS is a difficult and time consuming activity that should not be underestimated by the migration team. Careful planning and roll-out procedures should be in place before one commence on this journey. Process reference models are used in different fields to capture the generic process flow of activities. For the OSS domain, no process reference models could be found for migration purposes. Therefore, this study has as aim the suggestion of an initial set of process reference models for an organisational OSS migration. These process reference models were identified by capturing the process models for a case study that entailed the migration of the CSIR software systems and desktops from proprietary to OSS. From this set of process models, the migration processes were identified and refined to a set of suggested process reference models for organisational OSS migrations. This set of process reference models are useful to determine the processes necessary for organisations considering migrating to OSS. The study is divided into four research questions, where the first focusses on use and value of process reference models and the second on what is already known about OSS migration processes. The third deals with key processes within an organisational open source migration (OOSM) and the last with process reference models for an OOSM. For the first research question, the use and value of process reference models and the usefulness of utilising process reference models is discussed as well as using process models as a modelling tool to identify and capture processes. For the second research question, a summary is provided of what we know about OSS migration processes and a description about what the researcher and others have learnt about OSS, OSS migrations, process reference models, the process and its structure. For the third research question, the key processes within an OOSM is discussed as well as all the processes that took place during the OSS migration project from basic administrative processes to complex processes, from the beginning of the project until its completion. Lastly, for the fourth research question, process reference models that are essential for an OOSM and possible generic migration process models bound to reoccur are identified by the researcher and validated using a focus group discussion.