Some Observations on Open Source Software Development on Software Engineering Perspectives

Several argument has been made that open source software development process some times also referred as free and open source software development (FOSSD) violates the traditional software engineering principles and researches advocates to rethink and re-evaluate the studies and concepts of software engineering. The aim of this paper is to investigate the software development process models of Open source software on the software engineering perspectives. In this paper a discussion on some of development models of OSS and their comparison with the traditional development models is made and the software engineering practices followed in open source development environment is also been discussed. Principle difference and similarities of these development models with the conventional models are also discussed. The ultimate goal is to understand how open source software development processes are similar to or different from software engineering processes and to bring better understanding to the development process of Open Source Software.