gvwilson@nevex.com wrote:
Hi, folks. I hope you don't mind another mail out of the blue, but I got notice on Saturday that the Department of Energy is giving me $860K over two years to support development of easier-to-use software engineering tools. All of the work will be Open Source, and will be done in Python, with a strong emphasis on design, testing, and documentation. The project's long-term objective is to encourage scientists and engineers to treat programs in the same way as they do other experiments, i.e. to calibrate, test, peer review, and so on.
To kick-start things, we're going to be holding a two-round design competition. Anyone (individual or team, professional or student) can submit a short entry for the first round; the judges will pick four candidates to go forward in each of four categories, and those individuals or teams will be asked to submit full entries. The four categories are:
* an issue tracking system to replace Gnats and Bugzilla;
* a build system to replace make;
* a platform inspection and configuration system to replace autoconf; and
* a testing framework to replace XUnit, Expect, and DejaGnu.
Would you be interested in participating in any way
Are these categories fixed? I see a very strong need for an open-source UML modeling tool. UML is extremely powerful, but current UML tools largely suck and are very expensive. We are contemplating launching an open-source development effort to build UML modeling tools using Zope or the Zope object database as a repository. A contest like this could help to kick-start this effort, but tools to automate requirements and design seem to be missing. This is odd, considering that up-front activities like requirements and design have the largest impact on software-engineering project success. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:jim@digicool.com Python Powered! Technical Director (888) 344-4332 http://www.python.org Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com http://www.zope.org Under US Code Title 47, Sec.227(b)(1)(C), Sec.227(a)(2)(B) This email address may not be added to any commercial mail list with out my permission. Violation of my privacy with advertising or SPAM will result in a suit for a MINIMUM of $500 damages/incident, $1500 for repeats.