Jake Stride - University of Warwick

Open Source Development Techniques

Whilst working for a web development company in 2001, one of the projects on which I worked was developing an online project management system. With only a couple of developers working on the system it was a wonder the software ever made it out of the door and once it was being used it was continually being fixed for major bugs. With this in mind, and the experiences gained, I decided to develop a similar system using Open Source Development Techniques.

There are several web-based project management systems already available to the Open Source Community, so instead of re-inventing the wheel, it was decided to combine Project Management tools and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality in order to fill a gap in the software offerings. The result was EGS, which as of December 2003 had been downloaded by almost 2,000 people and the website viewed over 61,000 times.

With a software system in place and being actively developed, it was then possible to study the interactions between developers and users, to produce a study of the benefits, and potential pit-falls of using Open Source Development techniques to build software in a commercial environment.

This talk will look at some of the interesting outcomes of the study and how Open Source Development Techniques can be applied to commercial software development