ScienceDaily :: Faster, Better, Cheaper: Open-source Practices May Help Improve Software Engineering
ARLINGTON, Va. -- Walt Scacchi of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues are conducting formal studies of the informal world of open-source software development, in which a distributed community of developers produces software source code that is freely available to share, study, modify and redistribute. They're finding that, in many ways, open-source development can be faster, better and cheaper than the "textbook" software engineering often used in corporate settings.
In a series of reports posted online, Scacchi is documenting how open-source development breaks many of the software engineering rules formulated during 30 years of academic research. Far from finding that open-source development is just software engineering poorly done, Scacchi and colleagues show that it represents a new approach based on community building and other socio-technical mechanisms that might benefit traditional software engineering.
...Three projects--one by Les Gasser at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Scacchi, one by Scacchi and John Noll of Santa Clara University and one led by UC Irvine's Richard Taylor--are applying the lessons learned from open-source practices to create new design, process-management and knowledge-management tools for large-scale, multi-organization development projects.
"In many ways, open-source development projects are treasure troves of information for how large software systems get developed in the wild, if you will," Scacchi said.
K-Collector Topics: communication Design Knowledge Management Walt Scacchi University Of California