The Emerging Relationship between Software Quality and the Free & Open Source Software Environments

Wayne Smith & Albert Kinderman, Ph.D.

Wednesday, May 5, 2004

Networking @ 5:45; Business @ 6:45; Program @ 7:00 PM

Countrywide, 2900 Madera, Simi Valley, CA 93065

Recently, the free and open-source software movement has garnered a great deal of attention in both public- and private-sector organizations. This talk will provide an overview of major client-side and server-side open source software products and the key processes that are used in their development. This talk will also discuss some possible linkages between the "openness" of software source code and the resulting process quality within an organization and the resulting product quality of software deliverables.

Wayne Smith has been the Director of the Office of Information Technology in the College of Business and Economics at California State University, Northridge since 1994. Wayne has taught Information Systems courses at CSUN, designed and engineered networks, and has supervised a small team of software engineers at a Fortune 125 firm. Wayne is currently completing his Ph.D. in Information Science at Claremont Graduate University.

Al Kinderman is a Professor of Systems and Operations Management at CSUN. He received his BS in Math from Stanford in 1967 and a PhD in Statistics from the University of Minnesota in 1972. He has taught Statistics at Carnegie-Melon University and has been at CSUN since 1977. His early research was in algorithms for the computer generation of non-uniform random variables and more recently has worked with colleagues in the Finance department at CSUN as a statistical consultant. He has enjoyed working with alternative operating systems, starting with OS/2 1.3. Currently, he uses Debian GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows 2000 and XP.