Study Looks into Open Source -- Visual Studio Magazine

Study Looks into Open Source

The University of California, Davis gets National Science Foundation grant.

By Michael Desmond
11/01/2006

The University of California, Davis has won a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct a three-year study examining how open source software is built. Professor Premkuma Devanbu hopes the study will reveal how the structure and organization of development teams can impact the resulting code.

By examining high-profile open source projects such as the Apache Web server, PostgreSQL database and the Python scripting language, Devanbu hopes to draw meaningful conclusions about development organizations and their ability to produce quality software. Devanbu says his team selected open source projects because they are able to gain unfettered access to communications, including e-mails and IM chat logs.

One intriguing issue for Devanbu is the question of why open source projects seem to defy Brooks' Law, which states that adding manpower to a late software project only makes it later.

"It's not surprising when you bring people in, because you have to train them," says Devanbu. "But that doesn't seem to happen in open source projects-things seem to go faster. I'm not sure why. But it could be that people are trained before they join the project. They self-train."

About the Author

Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Cloud-Focused .NET Aspire 9.1 Released

Along with .NET 10 Preview 1, Microsoft released.NET Aspire 9.1, the latest update to its opinionated, cloud-ready stack for building resilient, observable, and configurable cloud-native applications with .NET.
Microsoft Ships First .NET 10 Preview

Microsoft shipped .NET 10 Preview 1, introducing a raft of improvements and fixes across performance, libraries, and the developer experience.
C# Dev Kit Previews .NET Aspire Orchestration

Microsoft's dev team has been busy updating the C# Dev Kit, a Visual Studio Code extension that enhances the C# development experience by providing tools for managing, debugging, and editing C# projects.
Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.