Philosophy of theOpenSourcery

TheOpenSourcery is dedicated to the notion that "always go to the Source" is a very helpful notion in development work. So our reviews, forum, and especially tutorials will feature source code, links to original work, actual screenshots, and live demos as much as possible. Also the website is dedicated to Open Source development in all its many forms from GNU GPL to CopyLeft through BSD Dual Licensing to full commercial development. However, commercial softwrae is far from ignored - we believe in finding the best regardless of Source. And here is why.

After more than 50 years of software development the Standish Reports and other analysts paint a rather grim picture of software development. One quarter of all IT projects (large, small or indifferent) will fail -
 - they will be terminated before completion or the code simply will not be used:
 - more than half of all IT projects will fall short on functions/feature sets while being over budget;
 - more than two-thirds of all IT projects will be delivered late;
See Cebase, Standish summary, KnowledgeStorm and the book Applied Software Measurement by Capers Jones for details and references.

Many observers have advanced theories as to why for over 50 years software development has seemed to be mired in incompetence. Here are four factors that still recur and deter success in systems development:

1)Every software system produces critical internal process changes. Many of those changes involve modifications in how group work is done, information flows, and decisions are made in an organization. These are changes to the basic group and organizational infrastructure involving many economic, social and political interests. Only within the last 10 years has the Management of Change process been fully recognized and begun to be controlled and managed in a systematic fashion as part of the development process;
2)Software and Hardware technologies mature and improve rapidly. In 50 years there have been at least a dozen major process or technology led revolutions. These are revolutions because the costs, functionality and price/performance can be so compelling as to make existing systems and/or processes redundant if not instantly obsolete - if you don't change others will and gain a competitive advantage. Revolutions such as timesharing, PCs with GUI/event driven interfaces, object oriented development; Moore's Law being sustained for over 40 years have obsoleted swaths of skills and displaced if not eliminated millions of jobs. Revolutions are ultimately beneficial- but they exact a toll - and among others is higher risk of failure with the new technology in its introductory phase - the so called bleeding edge effect;
3)All computing hardware (CPU, memory, disk space, communication capacity)continues to follow Moore's Law - doubling in capacity in less than two years for the same price. This is an outgrowth of Smith's Law - tools tend to be used to perfect themselves at an ever faster rate. The limits are reached when barriers in the form of some immutable laws of Nature are reached. It appears for the next ten years ahead there will be no insurmountable barriers although for the first time capital cost is rising faster than the returns. So super-imposed on the revolutions and their associated (and disruptive) killer applications, there has been an astonishingly relentless decline in the cost of computing hardware. Every 3 to 5 years the economics of computing changes for a new sector of society. The latest is communications where mobile technology will bring immediate connectivity to rich and poor nations alike in contrast with the capital intensive land-line telephone which has been reserved to the developed countries primarily. So system projects have had and continue to need to cope not just with internal organizational change but also often with external market and societal changes. This has inevitably added to the risks of projects.
4)Software development has become more complex. From centralized batch processing through separation of data and processing to heterogeneous, n-tier distributed processing - a system has evolved into a many headed hydra. It used to be simple - a single program interacting with one master control system (the OS)to the contemporary situation of many codes or applets smeared and interacting over mutiple clients and servers. When a problem/bug occurs where do you start looking for it.And the rate of change of programming languages (Assembler/Cobol/Fortran to RPG/PL1/Pascal to C/Focus/Basic to C++/Smalltalk/Visual Basic to Java/C#/PHP/Perl to ActionScript/Curl/Ruby/Water), and methodologies (input/processing/output analysis, structured methods, data and information modeling, event-based design, object-oriented analysis, asynchronous and synchronous design, adaptive and agile processes) reflect the need for developers to ever widen their base of knowledge. Today, developers typically have to have 7-8 technical skills: HTML, XML, SQL, UML or ERD, Cold Fusion or PHP or Perl, JavaScript or VBScript, CORBA/RPC or J2EE or .NET, C/C++ or Delph or Java or VB6/VBA, ABAP or PeopleScript or ..... A. Russell Jones over at Devx got it right - developers need a broad base of skills. Getting the right combination of skills lined up together on even a medium scale project can be a nightmare again increasing project risk even in these days of time-boxed, iterative, prototype-based development.

In sum, programming and system development is a risky business. One of the most effective ways to cope with the complexity and risk of software development is stanadrdized comparative development. That means method and source has to be open so that developers can compare processes and technologies on an equal footing. But another key is clear conceptual understanding. How do software components fit together, what do they aggregate to - and what are the priorities, benefits and trade-offs. How does the software fit in the big picture? These are two themes that this site will constantly return to while providing you with fast overviews and actual coding insights into some of the basic and emerging technologies with outstanding references as to where to get the best sources for details.

Open Sourcery is dedicated to the task of coping with system change and making it more manageable. Please enjoy.