[Cu-wireless] Faster, Better, Cheaper: Open-Source Practices May Help Improve Software Engineering

[Ralph Johnson]

I know Les Gasser.  He had a workshop on open source development
at UIUC about a month ago, and I went to it.  I learned about
several projects that will be useful to me, but the big idea
that I learned is that open source projects do not do requirements
analysis, and they do not need to because the developers are users.
It will be very hard to use open source techniques on projects
where the developers are not users.

I am lecturing on the open source software development process
tomorrow in CS327.  In particular, I am talking obout the paper
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar".  When people like Gasser and
Scacchi talk about open source, they are talking about Bazaar
projects.  But a lot of open source software is developed using
Cathedral techniques, such as GNU EMACS and qmail.

I would be happy to explain how to run a Bazaar project, if you
don't know already.  Or just read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar",
which is a great paper.

-Ralph