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FLOSS Project Management in Government-Academia Collaboration
Government and academia can collaborate on bringing innovation and filling design-reality gaps in e-government projects. However, differences in project management methods employed by the organizations is often a challenge for collaborative works. Bearing that in mind, we investigated a 30-month government-academia partnership to find appropriate ways to get around this obstacle. From the analysis of post-mortem data, we present a set of best practices based on FLOSS and agile software development approaches that favors team management in government-academia collaborations in e-government development projects.
Continuous delivery: building trust in a large-scale, complex government organization
For many software development teams, the first aspects that come to mind regarding continuous delivery (CD) are the operational challenges and competitive benefits. In the authors’ experience, CD was much more: it was a survival technique. This article presents how and why they applied CD in a large governmental project for the development of a collaborative development environment. They share the challenges they faced and the strategies they used to overcome them. The article concludes with a set of lessons learned that can be valuable for readers in a variety of situations. This article is part of a special issue on release engineering.
Brazilian Public Software Portal: an integrated platform for collaborative development
The Brazilian Public Software (SPB) is a program promoted by the Brazilian Federal Government to foster sharing and collaboration on Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) solutions for the public administration. In this context, a public software is considered a public good and the Federal Govern- ment assumes some responsibilities related to its use. Once its devolpment principles is the same of the FLOSS projects, we have designed the SPB Portal, a platform based on the integra- tion and evolution of existing FLOSS tools. It provides several modern features for software collaborative development, help- ing the Brazilian public administration in sharing its solutions. In this paper, we present this integrated software development platform that was developed for the SPB program by a het- erogeneous team composed by professors, master students and undergraduate students, as well as by professionals from FLOSS communities. The development of this platform used several FLOSS projects, providing a non-trivial integration among them. This effort has also produced several new fea- tures that were contributed back to these projects. Alongside the architectural challenges, we also discuss in this paper our work process, based on agile and free software development practices, and the lessons learned during 30 months of work on the SPB project.
Optimizing a Boundary Elements Method for Stationary Elastodynamic Problems implementation with GPUs
The Boundary Element Method requires a geometry discretization to execute simulations, and it can be used to analyze the 3D stationary behavior of wave propagation in the soil. Such discretization involves generating two high computational power demanding matrices, and this article demonstrates how Graphical Processing Units (GPU) were used to accelerate this process. In an experiment with 4000 Mesh elements and 1600 Boundary elements, a speedup of 107× was obtained with a GeForce GTX980.
