Software systems are growing in complexity, and increasingly require extended teams to create and maintain. Other factors, such as open source initiatives, cross-platform requirements and reliability concerns, suggest that formal processes are critical to developing successful software technologies. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of a widely embraced, open-source, cross-platform software process that incorporates elements of agile programming and test-driven development. We will demonstrate how this process, based on the popular CMake family of tools, has been used in several successful open-source systems to produce high-quality software across distributed development teams. Our exemplar systems include VTK (the Visualization Toolkit), ITK (the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit), and ParaView (a large-data, parallel visualization application). We will also provide a case history of the growth of CMake including its conception as part of government-funded, research effort to its widespread adoption by large software systems such as KDE, the Linux desktop environment, and Boost, the advanced C++ class libraries. We will also describe in detail how we use our software process to collaborate with academic, commercial and government partners to deliver maintainable, high quality software addressing challenging technical problems.


Bios:
Will Schroeder
Dr. Schroeder is President and co-founder of Kitware, Inc. Will's role at Kitware is to identify technology and business opportunities, and to obtain the necessary support for Kitware to meet these opportunities. Dr. Schroeder provides technical leadership in projects such as the Visualization Toolkit (vtk.org), NLM's Insight Toolkit project (itk.org), NSF-funded projects for higher-order finite element visualization and visual databases, DOE collaborative visualization, and various projects for medical image analysis.

Kitware was founded in 1998 to support the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) software that was initially created as a part of a visualization textbook authored by Will (along with Ken Martin and Bill Lorensen) and published by Prentice-Hall. Dr. Schroeder continues to contribute technically to the VTK software and also contributes to other open-source and proprietary software systems such as ITK.

Prior to his current position, Dr. Schroeder was computational scientist as the GE Corporate R&D Center where he developed software tools for the analysis of mechanical systems, including medical and computational visualization. In an earlier position at the same organization he developed advanced tools for fully automatic mesh generation. From 1980 through 1987 he was a design engineer at GE's Gas Turbine Division where he helped design and implement advanced simulation systems based on finite element, finite difference and boundary element methods.

Dr. Schroeder graduated in 1983 with a M.S. in applied mathematics, and in 1991 with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His Ph.D. was obtained part-time over an eleven year period while he worked full time at GE. Dr. Schroeder graduated summa cum laude from the University of Maryland in 1980 as a mechanical engineer. Dr. Schroeder continues to be active in the research community presenting papers, teaching courses, and participating on panel discussions at such conferences as Siggraph, IEEE Visualization, and Supercomputing. Dr. Schroeder has also been an invited speaker at conferences such as Pacific Graphics, the CINECA (Italy) Supercomputing Series, Visualization Development Environments 2000, and ATT Visualization Days.


Bill Hoffman
Mr. Hoffman is currently Vice President and CTO for Kitware, Inc. He is a founder of Kitware and has been part of the management team since 1999. Bill has 18+ years of experience with large C++ systems. He is a lead architect of the CMake cross-platform build system and co-author of the Mastering CMake book. Mr. Hoffman is also involved in the development of the Kitware Quality Software Process and CDash, the software testing server. Mr. Hoffman developed the C++/COM wrapping technology used to create Kitware's ActiViz product line. He has also made major contributions to VTK, ITK and ParaView. As CTO for Kitware, he guides the implementation and development of large-scale computing solutions, and oversees computer infrastructure decisions, including developing Kitware's E-Store technology.

Mr. Hoffman received a B.S in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida, and an M.S in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He is a graduate of the GE Software Technology Program. Prior to joining Kitware he spent nine years at GE's Global Research Center working in the Computer Vision Group. As an expert in C++ and object-oriented programming, he has planned and taught several graduate level courses at RPI, as well as a course on object-oriented programming at New York University. Mr. Hoffman has been an invited speaker at national and international conferences, such as FOSDEM and the KDE Developer's Conference.