The FAME Approach: an assessing methodology

In recent years the increasing of open source solutions extended the business opportunities for the IT companies but at the same time created problems for the choice and evaluation processes. For these reasons the need of approaches and tools to address this issue has become capital. We present FAME (Filter, Analyze, Measure and Evaluate), an iterative approach for open source software assessment, and an idea for a support tool for this methodology. In this paper we analyze the most interesting and important assessment methodologies and the FAME approach that derived by these, more heavyweight, proven approaches developed in a University research and consulting company environment, aims to match the needs of small organizations. The proposed approach has been used by FlossLab, the first spin-off of University of Cagliari, to select the best solutions. This tool can be useful to make easier the whole process, supporting the users in this choice by an interactive approach, particularly in the filtering and analysis phases.