The European Commission and the European Parliament generally use open source tools and methods for software development, concludes the EU-FOSSA project, following a review of 15 ongoing projects. The institutions’ project management tools make room for agile, collaborative development cycles.
Commonly-used open source tools include solutions for continuous integration and deployment of software, Jenkins and CruiseControl. These solutions let software developers manage updates of their code, which in turn helps to prevent errors.
Software developers working for the European Commission and the European Parliament also use open source code management tools Apache Subversion and GIT. The EC and EP software developers also commonly use Eclipse as integrated development environment, and Apache Maven as a build tool. For automated testing, they turn to Selenium.
In addition, software libraries related to security, such as OpenSSL and Spring Security, are standard development tools used in both institutions.
Focus
The review of the ongoing software projects at the EC and EP is one of the EU-FOSSA milestones. Details from this phase will be made available on the EU-FOSSA community within the next few weeks.
Both institutes combine project management methods with iterative and agile software development methods such as Scrum, Agile and Kanban. This provides room for an open approach to development, that focusses on the result and the intended user and prevents projects from getting bogged down in procedures.
The EU-FOSSA team will, as a next step, analyse the software development methodologies and practices of several free and open source software communities.
The project should result in a systematic approach for the EU institutions to ensure that widely-used key open source components can be trusted. The project will also enable the EU institutions to contribute to the integrity and security of key open source software. The EU-FOSSA project is managed by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT). It was initiated by the European Parliament.