Ectropic Design: Intelligent Collaboration Spaces for Open-Source Software

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Open-Source software has proven to be an exciting and productive alternative to traditional, process-driven software development. But Open Source has an inherent limitation--it has been most successful in those situations where a strong individual has served as a unifying force. Ectropic software design is proposed as a way of sustaining conceptual integrity in the absence of such a unifying force; ectrospaces are proposed as a collaboration technology to support ectropic design. The term ectropic is intended to describe software systems that maintain or increase their structuredness, as opposed to the more typical, entropic, case in which the structure and conceptual integrity of a system degrade as it evolves. Besides precisely defining the ectropic design process and building a prototype ectrospace, this project studies the power and practicality of ectropic software. It also investigates it in the setting of a sophomore-level, object-oriented development class. The class will undertake an Open-Source development effort using ectropic design and supported by an ectrospace. The resulting software and documentation will be distributed in Open Source form to the Internet community.