Práticas para gerência e desenvolvimento de projetos de software livre observadas em comunidades de sucesso.

Abstract

Free Software development has became an important study and research area in Software Engineering. Several communities are obtaining world success through this Apache community ande the Mozilla community. In this way, several questions arise in search of answers to explain their success and how other communities could apply those success experiences in your projects. This work presents the knowledge about free software development, obtained in successful communities, through a practice based representation. The selection of communities for observation, identification and analysis of practices undertaken had two major moments: an exploratory research in specific literature and an observation of behavioral and organizational aspects of virtual environments of free software development with fifty eight communities initially selected. Communities of practice organization principles and workflow based process principles were used for knowledge representation. For a detailed study, it was chosen a group of fifteen communities based on the fifty eight selected initially. This study took to the characterization of the following practices requirements acquisition and management, software versions release, bugs oriented evolution, quality assurance, internationalization and localization, configuration management, community coordination, communication and documentation. As main result of this work, we have an important portion about the knowledge generated and created by successful free software communities, organized and represented through a set of practices that can be explored by other communities.