Free and Open Source Software Development and Research: Opportunities for Software Engineering

Abstract

Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities have produced a large amount of valuable software that is directly or indirectly used daily by any person with access to a computer. The field of Software Engineering studies processes, mechanisms, tools, and frameworks for the development of software artifacts. Historically, however, most of Software Engineering research and education does not benefit from the large and rich source of data and experimental testbeds offered by FLOSS projects and their hundreds of millions of lines of working code. In this paper, we discuss how Software Engineering research and education can greatly benefit from the wealth of information available in the FLOSS ecosystem. We then evaluate how FLOSS has been used, up to now, by papers published in the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. Finally, we present an agenda for the future, proposing concrete ways to exploit the synergies between research and education in Software Engineering and FLOSS projects.