Findings: OSS Practices May Help Improve Software Engineering

[Michael ODonnell]

 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/12/031204074828.htm

Excerpt:
> 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 (see http://www.isr.uci.edu),
> 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.