Adopting Open Source Software Engineering (OSSE) Practices by Adopting OSSE Tools

Introduction One ongoing challenge facing the software engineering profession is the need for average practitioners to adopt powerful software engineering tools and methods. Starting with the emergence of software engineering as a field of research, increasingly advanced tools have been developed to address the difficulties of software development. Often these tools addressed accidental difficulties of development, but some have been aimed at essential difficulties such as management of complexity, communication, visibility, and changeability (Brooks 1987). Later, in the 1990's, the emphasis shifted from individual tools toward the development process in which the tools were used. The software process movement produced good results for several leading organizations, but it did not have much impact on average practitioners. Why has adoption of CASE tools been limited? Often the reason has been that they did not fit the day-to-day needs of the developers who were expected to use them