Paper - iPres 2013 - Lisbon

If a business is in need of customized software it often orders it from a third party developer. This can lead to a dependency on this developer regarding maintainability and development of the product. Software Escrow o_ers a mitigation to this as it includes a trustable escrow agent in the business relationship. The agent is responsible for depositing all material that is needed to develop the software, like source code, documentation, and licenses for software artifacts. If a prede_ned trigger event occurs, the agent is obliged to hand out the objects to the customer. Thus the material needs to be of a quality that allows the customer to further maintain and develop the software. To guarantee this, all artifacts deposited are veri_ed for their maintainability. As this veri_cation is a time consuming and costly factor, we propose a Technical Software Escrow Framework that supports the reviewing process by highlighting parts of the software that can pose a problem regarding their maintainability. We also analyze an exemplary use-case software to show the applicability of our framework.

Software Escrow, Software Quality, Evaluation, Verication Framework, Case Study, iPRES, Lisbon

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