Walt Scacchi from UCL Irvine will be one of the keynote speakers at the 6th International Software Engineering Conference. We were very glad to receive his positive response to our invitation for giving a keynote at the premier event of the global software engineering community. Now we are quite excited about what he is going to talk about the relationship between open source software development and global software engineering. This is going to be very interesting talk for anyone interested in global software engineering as Walt is world renowned researchers on OSS development paradigm and it would be quite insightful to listen to his views about how OSS and GSE are related and what both software development paradigms can offer to each others in terms of challenges, solutions, and lesson learned. The title of his talk is:
Free/Open Source Software Development as an Approach to Global Software Engineering
The abstract of his talk is: Free/Open Source Software Development (FOSSD) is not the same as Global Software Engineering (GSE). Why this is so is unclear and open to various interpretations. Both address the challenges of developing large software systems with globally dispersed teams, but the development processes, work practices, and project forms differ significantly and in interesting ways according to recent empirical studies. This presentation reports on highlights from such research studies over the past 10 years that relates to or informs our understanding of FOSSD, collaborative FOSSD work, FOSS evolution, and emerging FOSS ecosystems. FOSSD and GSE are complementary in many ways, yet different in others, so understanding these complements and differences can help advance the future of research in both areas. Some of these complements and differences are identified in this presentation, along with research challenge problems that merit further study in the next 5-10 years.