Use Cases


To put FASTEN’s expected economic impact into perspective, according to the State of European Tech report, there are 5.5 million people working as software developers in Europe. The vast majority of those developers are using open source dependencies in their projects; as the study from Contrast Security revealed, 80% of the code in today’s applications comes from dependencies

FASTEN has the potential to have a direct impact on the every day work life of practically all software engineers, through automating mundane tasks (e.g., checking for stale dependencies or monitoring vulnerability databases) and helping them evolve their code and libraries in a data-driven way. Optimising dependency management will thus lead to large cost savings in software-driven organizations.

FASTEN’s results will increase the quality of the products delivered by the use case providers of the project in the axes of reliability, efficiency, maintainability, and portability.

Use Case Partners

Endocode, XWiki, and SIG will reduce the risks of leaking bugs in production code, with benefits for their employees as well as their end-user customers. Providing a better package management experience should increase the security and the adaptability of the software.

FASTEN’s technologies will foster the easier and safer implementation of modern systems and applications developed by the open source community and private companies. Specifically, the functionality of these systems can increase by allowing them to take up dependencies on more components with less risk. The reliability of software-intensive systems will improve by controlling dependencies through their rigorous risk management. Furthermore, the efficiency of implemented systems can improve by providing data for the selective rather than the wholesale incorporation of dependencies.
In addition, significant maintainability improvements are envisaged by making dependencies easier to analyse and change, by simplifying test coverage analysis, and by increasing stability through the reduction of redundant dependencies.
Finally, from a systems administration perspective, FASTEN will make software more portable, making it easier to install and adapt to new platforms, co-exist with other software, be replaced by compatible implementations, and demonstrate regulatory compliance.

Use Case 1 : Integration with XWiki

XWiki SAS will be both a developer and a client of the FASTEN core development team.
XWiki will use FASTEN as the basis for a new plug-in mechanism for their modular wiki software, and especially in the following 3 scenarios: Next Generation Extension Manager, Security Improvements and Improved Ecosystem Management. 

Use Case 2 : Ecosystem-aware build-system integrated compliance tooling

Quartermaster, developed by project partner Endocode, is a license compliance solution. Open Source compliance is complicated by the fact that it is an inter-disciplinary field that requires software engineering, business and legal knowledge. Endocode will use FASTEN to improve the precision of their license compliance offering. 

Use Case 3 : Application of FASTEN services to commercial software systems

SIG is a consulting firm that specializes in providing actionable advice on the quality, risks and costs of developing and maintaining software systems. SIG will integrate FASTEN to BetterCodeHub, their GitHub-connected code quality monitoring product. This case study aims to exploit the majority of the services developed by FASTEN, but focuses on the analysis and aggregation of quality and security risks to applications.