About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Publication
ICSE 2010
Workshop paper
Toward proactive knowledge protection in community-based software development
Abstract
Leveraging the abundant community resources, e.g. campus students, programming fans, software amateurs, is promising to be a flexible and effective approach for relieving the enterprise's IT resource shortage. However, the concern about confidential knowledge exposure makes most enterprises hesitate to outsource software development to community resources. Unlike the traditional legal protection mechanism that prevents community resources from exposing the already known confidential knowledge, this paper presents a proactive confidential knowledge protection technology, which prevents the community resources from learning the confidential knowledge in software development activities. First, the client is facilitated on identifying confidential knowledge involved in the software development activity. Then, the risky software design elements that might expose confidential knowledge are identified in both qualitative and quantitative way. Based on the identification result, a holistic proactive protection solution is presented by orchestrating task reservation, task pretending and task partition activities. Finally, the processed software development tasks are dispatched to community developers without worrying about the confidential knowledge exposure. The technology has been preliminarily validated in two community-based software development cases. © 2010 ACM.