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Educational Experiences with F/OSS Development Projects:

Helping the Inmates Take Over the Asylum Walt Scacchi

Institute for Software Research

University of California, Irvine

Irvine, CA 92697-3425

Wscacchi@ics.uci.edu

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi

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OSS Development Experiences

• USC System Factory Project: 1981-1990– Domain: Large-scale software engineering– Developed and delivered advanced SE tools in

>500K SLOC, 30K papers of documentation.– Educated ~2% of all CS M.S. and Ph.D.

students in US during 1981-1988.– Produced 8 CS Ph.D’s

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OSS Development Experiences

• USC ATRIUM Laboratory Project: 1993-1998– Domain: E-Commerce, E-Business, and Business

Process Reengineering– Developed automated tools, techniques and processes

for process-driven EC and EB intranets/extranets– Educated >250 MBA students– Results applied to Telecomm, Aerospace, IT, Health

Care, Feature Film Production, and Military enterprises– Received about $2M in external funding from

enterprise sponsors

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OSS Development Experiences

• UCI Graduate School of Management: 1999-2004– Domain: Enterprise portals and content/course

management systems– Studied and reverse engineered requirements,

specs, and architecture of GSM’s EP/CMS– Prototyped and demonstrated >60 EP/CMS– Educated > 250 MBA students– Students received >$1M in venture capital

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OSS Development Experiences• UCI Institute for Software Research: 1999-2005

– Domain: Free/OSSD projects in (academic) research or (commercial) development areas.

– Four National Science Foundation grants for field study of OSSD processes, practices, and community dynamics

– Producing growling knowledge base of fastest, best, and cheapest ways to develop F/OSS systems in different settings.

– Funding at >$1.5M

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New OSS Development Projects

• Computer Game Research Grid: 2003-2008• Science Learning Games for Informal

Science Education: 2005-2006• Computer Supported Cooperative

Organizational Learning Environment (CSCOLE): 2005-?

• All projects are multi-disciplinary w/faculty and student participants.

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Lessons Learned• OSSD encourages reinvention as a learning mode• Students will work hard to build software systems

for domains they find intrinsically motivating.• Students benefit professionally from their

participation in projects that have application outside of the university.

• Faculty need to provide socio-technical leadership, and need to encourage students to work as a socio-technical interaction network

• http://www.isr.uci.edu/research-open-source.html