Learning Software Industry Practices with Open Source and Free Software Tools

This chapter describes a pragmatic approach to using open source and free software tools as valuable resources to affect learning of software industry practices using iterative and incremental development methods. The authors discuss how the above resources are used in teaching undergraduate Software Engineering (SE) courses. More specifically, they illustrate iterative and incremental development, documenting software requirements, version control and source code management, coding standards compliance, design visualization, software testing, software metrics, release deliverables, software engineering ethics, and professional practices. The authors also present how they positioned the activities of this course to qualify it for writing intensive designation. End of semester course evaluations and anecdotal evidence indicate that the proposed approach is effective in educating students in software industry practices.

Managing Knowledge in Open Source Software Test Process

The increasing adoption and use of Open Source Software (OSS) motivates study of its development. This chapter explores the state-of-the art in OSS development processes, in general, and OSS testing processes, in particular. A conceptual model for software Testing Knowledge Management (TKM) that aims to provide an understanding of the testing domain is introduced. The TKM model is informed by earlier studies and guided by international testing standards. Moreover, the TKM model is equipped with different forms of knowledge, reusable across software projects. Using the TKM model as an integrative conceptual model enables understanding of how knowledge life cycle stages are mapped onto the test process of OSS, what type of knowledge is created at each stage, and how knowledge is converted from one stage to another. The chapter is supported by representative examples of OSS that are mature and currently in widespread use.

Creating Open-Source Interactive Articles for the Wider Publics

A core form of the international sharing of research and analysis is done through articles, both those presented in live conferences and those published in any number of journals. Interactive articles integrate various elements to the basic text: hyperlinks; immersive simulations; electronic games; data sets; knowledge collections; digital photographs; multimedia; integrated wikis and blogs; and other aspects. These value-added pieces that build exploration, experience, and interactivity, are enabled by current authoring tools and Web servers and open-source contents. Enriched articles often encourage return engagements, and their open-source publishing often leads to greater levels of citations and readership. These enable the design of a work for multiple audiences, with opt-in sections for different levels of readers, for example. Interaction enables opportunities for more reflection, recursiveness, and understanding a topic from multiple angles and different levels of abstraction. Interactive articles tend to appear in open-source (or at least open-access) publications online, which enables access by wider reading publics and machine-searchability and often wider citations.

Open Universities Australia

This chapter analyses the history of, and future directions for, higher education studies undertaken through Open Universities Australia (OUA), Australia's unique higher education conduit. Founded to provide open access to units that allow individuals to undertake individual units or achieve qualifications from leading Australian universities, and supported by a federal government student loans scheme, OUA's experience and future plans provide significant insight into the potential and pitfalls of the technological innovation in both higher education distance, and increasingly, on-campus, teaching and learning. The need for an ongoing emphasis on innovation, adaptability, and cooperation in an extraordinarily rapidly changing environment is highlighted.

Institutional Repositories Initiatives in India

The purpose of this chapter is to present the development and current situation of Institutional Repositories (IRs) in India. This chapter explores the main concepts of open access, institutional repositories, and their needs and benefits. The chapter highlights the current status of Institutional Repositories (IR) in India by its collection type, subject coverage, and present working status of the repositories available to the academic community as open sources. This chapter examines the overall growth of IRs in Asia and enumerates the Institutional Repositories in India. The chapter analyzes the accessible institutional repositories based on the selected study criteria and studies various digital library software used in the development of IRs in India.

Model-Driven Reverse Engineering of Open Source Systems

Open source software systems have poor or inexistent documentation and contributors are often scattered or missing. The reuse-based composition and maintenance of open source software systems therefore implies that program comprehension becomes a critical activity if all the embedded behavior is to be preserved. Program comprehension has traditionally been addressed by reverse engineering techniques which retrieve system design models such as class diagrams. These abstract representations provide a key artifact during migration or evolution. However, this method may retrieve large complex class diagrams which do not ensure a suitable program comprehension. This chapter attempts to improve program comprehension by providing a model-driven reverse engineering technique with which to obtain business processes models that can be used in combination with system design models such as class diagrams. The advantage of this approach is that business processes provide a simple system viewpoint at a higher abstraction level and filter out particular technical details related to source code. The technique is fully developed and tool-supported within an R&D project about global software development in which collaborate two universities and five companies. The automation of the approach facilitates its validation and transference through an industrial case study involving two open source systems.

Learning4Content

The world over, some common factors have contributed to the emergence and growth of open educational resources. These can be to increase access to educational materials, to reduce the costs, to enhance the quality of educational content through working collaboratively, and to be used for capacity building and research. The WikiEducator project has been the foremost initiative to turn digital divide into digital dividends through free content and open networks. WikiEducator was established on 1 May 2006, and since then, it has grown a very big network of more than 66,700 registered WikiEducators. Learning4Content is one of the flagship initiative of WikiEducator providing free training for teachers. In this chapter, the author discusses building a vibrant and sustainable global community contributing to design, development, and delivery of free content for learning and providing training to develop wiki skills for mass collaboration to create high quality learning resources.

Managerial Perspective of E-Resources in Academic Libraries

The rapid increase of e-resources together with several value-based applications has been gradually superseding the traditional means of communication in almost all parts of the world. The transformation enforced government-funded consortia to build ICT environments in academic institutions and created a pressing demand on the libraries for increasing their acquisitions. The bundled (packages) resources available to libraries through several means are raising issues about their usefulness, real benefit as per user's preferences, and also the usage. Issues of the kind invariably require thought, exceptional policy decisions, and implementing standard procedures for the optimum utilization of expensive resources and their management. The chapter discusses the features of e-resources, challenges encountered by the library administrators, the existing and innovative practices in their evaluation and organization, while highlighting the supporting technologies and integrated management tools emerging as per the latest requirements of academic institutions.

Effort, Time, and Staffing in Continually Evolving Open-Source Projects

Scheduling and staffing are important management activities in software projects. In closed-source software development, the relationships among development effort, time, and staffing have been well established and validated: the development effort determines the development time and the best number of developers that should be allocated to the project. However, there has been no similar research reported in open-source projects. In this chapter, the authors study the development effort, development time, and staffing in an open-source project, the Linux kernel project. Specifically, they investigate the power law relations among development effort, development time, and the number of active developers in the Linux kernel project. The authors find the power law relations differ from one branch to another branch in the Linux kernel project, which suggests different kinds of management and development styles might exist in different branches of the Linux kernel project. The empirical knowledge of software development effort obtained in this study could help project management and cost control in both open-source communities and closed-source industries.

Social Networks and Internet Communities in the Field of Geographic Information and Their Role in Open Data Government Initiatives

Users are playing an increasingly relevant role in geospatial data production. The traditional procedure for creating cartography, mainly by experts in official mapping agencies, has evolved into a more participative process for generating data: neogeography. Technology and the Internet are now user-friendly for a wide range of people who have become active users of global networks, such as GEOSS, INSPIRE, Eye On Earth, and EarthCube, and official producers need to adapt to the new era of openness, collaboration, and hybrid maps by adopting open standards. Although the creation of geospatial information is notably growing worldwide, and is enhanced by user-generated content, we may wonder whether this is a feasible alternative to official cartography. This chapter reviews the main geospatial networks based on both bottom-up and top-down data creation approaches, as well as the potentialities and limitations of user-generated content in the scientific field and in decision-making organisms.