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Open-Source Development 'Faster, Better, Cheaper'

Posted by michael on from the plan-for-success dept.

David Hart writes "Faster, Better, Cheaper: Open-Source Practices May Help Improve Software Engineering -- 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."

4 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. surprising? by tomstdenis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Textbook soft.eng is about making money and how to prevent from being sued [e.g. you do what you agreed todo].

    While OSS development [well freelance stuff anyways] tends to be more about actually getting work out the door. Don't like this particular OSS, fix it or find other stuff. E.g. no pandoring to stupid demands of market droids.

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  2. Definitions! by joel.neely · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In the context of development, "faster" and "cheaper" are somewhat well-defined, but "better" is simply too fuzzy. There are many qualities which contribute to "better", and some of them are in conflict (e.g. "more profitable for the marketer" vs. "easier to get bugs fixed"), depending on the value system of the speaker.

    We need to be more precise in our terms when defending or advocating open source, else we'll appear as silly as the suits that think that programmers that expend more lines of code to produce a solution are thereby more productive (or geeks-who-should-know-better who think that execution wall clock time is the only measure of "efficiency").

  3. Fear not, corporate developers by jrm228 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    My limited experience with open source is summed up with this article sentence:
    ~~~
    Not all open-source projects are alike, however. A small number of open-source projects have become well known, but the vast majority never get off the ground, according to Scacchi.
    ~~~
    Open source is obviously faster/better/cheaper when 1000's of people donate their time to a single project. The only open source project I've been involved in was a collaboration among several corporations, all of which wanted to leverage each other's resources, but none of which could really contribute their own.

    There's nothing like money to motivate people to work on a project for which people aren't willing to donate their time.

    Personally, I'm not convinced speed is related to developer quantity. There's too big a variation in productivity between experienced and amateur developers.

    I'm also not convinced open-source is right for all types of software. How many open-source developers you know that conduct large-scale usability tests? How many open-source developers go around interviewing end users? When the developer and product consumer is the same, open-source makes much more sense to me.

  4. Most of the times this wouldn't work.... by cREW+oNE · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This setting wouldn't work most of the time, IMHO.

    For open source to work there needs to be a certain public interest in the software, and there need to be developers in the group of interested people. Opening up software that nobody wants to look at or develop further is totally pointless.

    A lot of software out there (I dare to argue it's the majority of the software out there.) is simply too boring or to business-specific to benefit at all from open source.

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    +++ATH0