The Design And Implementation Of Software Development Intellectual Property Governance Tool

At present, the open-source idea in the software industry has been widely used. For commercial users, open source is of great significance. Firstly it can reduce the development cycle, secondly, it can reduce costs. However, in the software development process, we can not recklessly use of open source software, because this would bring a lot of legal problems. How we spend at minimum cost to obtain the most information on intellectual property issues placed in front of us. The existing intellectual property solutions on software development are checking the intellectual property of software development at later stages. This will bring about very serious potential problem. The correct approach is to check intellectual property issues in the whole development process. In other words, from the beginning of software development, we should track software development behavior, and determine whether import the intellectual property issues, rather than just in the end of software development cycle, we start to care about intellectual property issues.Based on the idea that it is better to manage the intellectual property issues during the software development life cycle. We developed the software development intellectual property governance tool. This tool comprises an Eclipse-based client and an intellectual property management server. The client records the developer's action and the server defines the project and generates report for project manager to view.In client, this paper proposes and implements two data model:Provenance Metadata Schema and IP-metadata Schema. Provenance Metadata Schema records provenance information of a coding unit instead of its content and partitions each developer's contribution into different artifacts. More original information has been kept, so based on the information, many analyses and statistics can be made to get valuable conclusions. Recording the operation history instead of content facilitates the clarification of each developer's responsibilities and contribution. We have introduced the provenance tracking mechanism which records the evolvement events of the codes into section-based structures and associate the IP information into the structure. In Provenance Metadata Schema, we can regard the successive operations performed by a same developer during once modification on these objects as such a fundamental unit, and call the fundamental unit "Section". The Provenance Metadata contains nothing except a set of sections. Since the operations contained in each section are only subjected to one developer, use section as fundamental units can partition each developer's contribution. Besides, the operation records will be fixed once the developer has finished his modification and quit from the editor, and this feature will facilitate signing. Furthermore, we can extract some common attributes from every section, such as author, owner, modify time, thus we can define a uniform fundamental structure for each section even they are used to describe documents of different types.The intellectual property metadata is used to describe and organize the intellectual property information generated during the software development process. The intellectual property metadata includes many aspects of intellectual property such as authors and license, etc. As most IDEs maintain the codes with a hierarchical structure including project, package and file, intellectual property metadata also has three levels of intellectual property metadata:File, package and Project, respectively. The file intellectual property metadata is the atomic entity that stores the basic intellectual property information that describes the copyright data pertaining to the codes. The package and project intellectual property metadata are aggregated and extracted from all contained files'intellectual property metadata.The main function of the server-side can be divided into two parts:the maintenance of intellectual property related information and intellectual property report generation and viewing. In the part of the maintenance of intellectual property information, the server's main job is response to a user's request through access to data in a database. In the report'generation and view part, we designed and implemented four kinds of intellectual property report:Certificate of Originality Report, External Copy and Paste Report, Code Scan Keywords Report and Code Originality Checklist Report. These reports cover the entire intellectual property issues the project may arise.In our system, we abstract entities in the system and divided it into three layers: the core platform layer, database layer and presentation layer. The core platform layer defines the basic data model and data manipulation interface, and the database layer implemented the interfaces, in our system, including the Derby and the DB2 implementation.The presentation layer call the interface and show the result. Then, the paper also introduced the four kinds of the report data model and implementation. Finally, we did experiments and evaluation for the software development intellectual property governance tool, experiments show that the tool can be effective management of intellectual property information in the software development process. End, the article points out the outstanding issues at this stage in the software development management tools, and pointed out the direction of the corresponding solutions.