In a series of online reports UCI computer science researcher Walt Scacchi is documenting how open-source development breaks many of software engineering's formal rules, representing a new and better approach based on community building.

"This is perhaps a new fertile ground between software engineering and the world of open-source, and maybe what the open-source community can contribute to new academic and commercial development efforts," Scacchi told NewsFactor.

Software Wants to be Free

"Free and open-source software development is faster, better and cheaper in building a community and at reinforcing and institutionalizing a culture for how to develop software," said Scacchi, a senior research scientist at UC Irvine's Institute for Software Research.

"We're not ready to assert that open-source development is the be-all and end-all for software engineering practice, but there's something going on in open-source development that is different from what we see in the textbooks."

Studying open-source projects to understand when the processes and practices work and when they don't, Scacchi and his colleagues hope to help businesses understand the implications of adopting open-source methods internally or investing in external open-source communities.

Bug Influence

Scacchi joins other researchers -- Les Gasser at the University of Illinois, John Noll of Santa Clara University, and UC Irvine's Richard Taylor -- "in applying lessons learned from open-source practices to create new design, process-management and knowledge-management tools for large-scale, multi-organization development projects," said National Science Foundation (NSF) spokesperson David Hart.

Mining open-source project databases, which record hundreds of thousands of bug reports, Gasser and Scacchi are trying to understand how bug reporting relates to software quality.

"These are unprecedented data sets in software engineering research," Scacchi told NewsFactor. "We're thinking of these databases in a 'national treasure' sense. We're never going to get this from a corporate source."

When Open Sources Close Up Shop

While a small number of open-source projects, such as Linux, have become well known, the vast majority fail, Scacchi explained.

Understanding how successful projects, such as the Linux kernel, grow from a few individuals to thousand-developer communities is essential to open-source research.

"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.

Scacchi and colleagues are looking at more than a hundred open-source projects in several categories. On their list of more to explore: network games such as PlaneShift and id Software's Quake; Internet and Web infrastructure projects, such as Apache and Mozilla; and industry-sponsored open-source projects, such as NetBeans from Sun Microsystems and IBM's Eclipse.

Evolution Revolution

Informal, agile, and cheaper, open-source development provides faster software evolution. It also quickly spreads expertise through the development community, Scacchi explained.

"Open-source is not a poor version of software engineering, but a private-collective approach to large-software systems," Scacchi said.

"The software-intensive systems in today's world have become so complex that we need every available design tool at our disposal," said NSF program director Suzanne Iacono. "Open-source development has achieved some remarkable successes, and we need to learn from these successes as our systems become increasingly distributed, complex and heterogeneous."