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Jim Whitehead |
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University of California, Santa Cruz |
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Expensive people |
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Thin spread of domain knowledge |
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Developers isolated from user community |
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Defects costly to identify and fix |
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Long release cycles (~6months and up) |
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Many Open Source success stories |
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Apache, sendmail, GIMP, CVS, Emacs, etc. |
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Some mixed results as well |
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Mozilla, OpenOffice |
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Best projects are category leaders |
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Clearly these projects are doing some things
right… |
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What are the generalizable lessons that can be
applied to more conventional projects? |
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Releases on 2-4 week timeframes are possible |
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Major Web applications release features on a
weekly basis |
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Research challenges |
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Software architectures that accommodate new
features without major rework |
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Automated regression testing increases in
importance |
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SCM tools and best practices |
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Open Source fosters immediate and direct
interaction between end users and development team |
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Open mailing lists |
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Bug report forms & searchable databases |
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Open code and interfaces facilitate
contributions by sophisticated end users |
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Research challenge: |
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Reduce gap with end users without loss of
productivity or focus |
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Open source projects draw on global talent pool |
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Leverage the Internet: |
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CVS, Web, email, bugzilla |
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SourceForge offers pushbutton creation of a
remote software development environment |
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Research challenges |
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What kinds of software development tools can be
Web-based? |
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Text editors? Probably not. |
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Regression tests and code analysis? Sure. |
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Enhance the Web infrastructure for software
development |
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DeltaV project: SCM facilities for HTTP |
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Rapid releases |
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Reduces complexity of each release |
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Incremental, not big-bang releases |
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Integration of end users |
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Geographically dispersed projects |
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Increase applied brainpower without violating
Brooks’ Law |
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Draw on global talent pool |
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Members are talented and motivated |
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Reinforced by meritocratic culture |
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Tool support a must to achieve these goals |
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Workshop on Open-Source Software Engineering |
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Organized by Feller, Fitzgerald, van der Hoek |
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Strongly related: |
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“An Empirical Study of Global Software
Development: Distance and Speed”, Herbsleb, Mockus, Finholt, Grinter (p.
81) |
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“Using the Web for Document Versioning: An
Implementation Report for DeltaV” |
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Hunt & Reuter (p. 507) |
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Notes