Abstract Much as software is very useful as a driving force of physical machine in assisting many aspects of human endeavor, it is also often accomplished with delicate aspect especially when correct specification and quality are not met. Ranging from less critical applications (such as payroll), to highly sophisticated application (such as health care system) as well as mission critical applications (such as space mission), failures in the functionality of these systems are often accompanied by disproportionate heavy losses to the respective users. In addition, industrial application is performance-intensive and cannot afford to fail. In this paper, our novel Open Onions Ontology was presented which approaches software development from a layered point of view, the open source approach as an alternative methodology for industrial application development was proposed. Various issues involved in industrial applications were reviewed, the current industrial development methodologies were discussed and possibilities of adopting open source were explored. 1. INTRODUCTION Industrial applications are usually built strictly by conformance to quality standards while following conventional software development methodologies. For instance, incremental software development as specified by the Humphrey’s rules [CEAAEBAS98] would provide some rules for software management teams to follow during requirements and design phases of a software process, the cleanroom Engineering models would require an independent quality assessment through verification based development inspection of increments and statistical testing; such would be made possible through the use of software development pipelining. Capability maturity model (CMM & CMMI) have actually related software process maturity to five levels with level 1 being the initial level and level 5 being the optimized level. Unfortunately, many industrial software applications could not lay claim to be at their highest level of maturity as specified by CMMI. Despite all these attempts according to Boehm and Basili [Boehm2000] software still remain surprisingly fragile, prone to unpredictable performance, dangerously open to malicious attack, and vulnerable to failure at implementation despite most rigorous development processes. In many cases, they said, software has been assigned tasks beyond its maturity and reliability. DeMarco [DEMARCO99] explained that the quality of a product is a function of how much it changes the world for the better. However, the Open Source development process has defied traditional software development practices by generating widely accepted products (e.g. Linux, Apache, and Perl) while following unconventional principles such as the distribution of free source code and massive user participation [DEMARCO99] Our earlier paper [SHOWOLE06] had discussed quite a number of software quality assurance activities with respect to quality industrial application development, as specified by various standards organizations ranging from ISO, SPICE, FURPS, IEEE, and some other quality standards and models that are available to be conformed to in ensuring the development of quality software. Comparisons were made to highlight the similarities and differences between proprietary software development and open source software development paradigms. It was discovered that proprietary or open source, they are both software but the licenses and the massive developer/user participation in open source development actually distinguishes the two paradigms. 2. ISSUES IN INDUSTRIAL APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT a. MANAGEMEMNT OF INDUSTRIAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMNET In the 1990s, software processes were primarily managed and improved by conforming to the requirements of various standards and software development models. To be able to manage and improve software processes more thoroughly several approaches have been developed during the last decades. Some of such approaches are: • SEI’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM) • Humphrey’s latest Personal Software Process (PSP) • BOOTSTRAP - the European approach • SPICE - the new International standard being developed Industrial Application Development with Open Source Approach Showole Aminat, Suhaimi Ibrahim and Shamsul Sahibuddin Faculty of Computer Science and Information System Software Engineering Department, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) aminatshowole@yahoo.com , suhaimiibrahim@utm.my and shamsul@fsksm.utm.my The Third International Conference on Software Engineering Advances 978-0-7695-3372-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICSEA.2008.52 152 The Third International Conference on Software Engineering Advances 978-0-7695-3372-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICSEA.2008.52 152