An Open Source-Based Approach to Software Development Infrastructures

As software systems become larger and more complex, automated software engineering tools play a crucial role for effective software development management, which is a key factor to lead quality software systems. In this work, we present TRICA, an open source-based software development infrastructure. The name of TRICA represents its features such as Traceability, Relationship, Informativeness, Cost-effectiveness, and Automation. Essentially, in TRICA, a continuous integration tool is coupled with a software configuration management tool and an issue tracking tool. We provisioned a mechanism to connect the open source tools in TRICA so that project members use the collaborated information to solve various issues and implementation problems efficiently, and easily share forthcoming issues during the course of the project. We show that TRICA can help to decentralize risks throughout the software development cycle and achieve successful software development.

I. Introduction

With the ever increasing size and complexity of software systems, software projects are required to be well-managed in order to achieve better quality and productivity so that they can stay competitive in the market. Furthermore, as the trends of technology change quickly and user demands for products are diversified, many organizations collaborate with distributed teams, utilize commercial off-the-shelf products (COTS), and even adopt open source software so as to develop and deploy quality products in time. As a result, large software systems that consist of a great number of components are typically developed, tested, and maintained by many people encompassing several organizations and sometimes located in geographically distributed places.