In early 1999, VA Software launched a project to understand how the Internet development community had been able to produce software faster and with higher quality than comparable commercially available alternatives. Our goal was simple: determine how to make more software development projects successful.
We discovered that successful Internet community projects employed a number of practices that were not well characterized by traditional software engineering methodologies. We now refer to those practices as Collaborative Software Development or CSD. Late in 1999 we developed the SourceForge platform to make it easy for even small software development projects to employ those practices, and in November of 1999 launched the SourceForge.net web site based on the SourceForge platform. The site was an overwhelming success, and in less than two years, grew to support more than 27,000 software development projects and over a quarter million software developers worldwide.
SourceForge.net affords us an unequaled test bed for understanding CSD. In response to demand from companies seeking to enable CSD within their organizations, we announced a commercial version of the SourceForge platform, SourceForge Enterprise Edition, in August 2001. This presentation will describe the principles of CSD, the software development pain points those principles address, and our experience enabling CSD with the SourceForge platform.
About the speaker:
Larry Augustin, CEO, founded VA Software in 1993 as a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. A strong advocate of collaborative software development, Augustin was the visionary behind SourceForge.net, which quickly became the world's largest Open Source development Internet site following its launch in November 1999. Augustin serves on the board of directors for OSDL, the Open Source Development Lab, and Linux International. Prior to VA Software, Augustin was a research associate in the Program Analysis and Verification Group (PAVG) at Stanford University where he worked on rapid prototyping languages, software engineering, hardware verification, and software prototyping environments. Prior to Stanford, he worked as a systems engineer on high-speed switched digital services at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Larry Augustin holds a PhD and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a BSEE from the University of Notre Dame.
Contact information:
Larry Augustin