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Mission
This project seeks to enlighten and encourage software developers
to strive for improved professional software development practices.
Background
The name "Tigris.org" comes from the river Tigris. The valley
between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was the location of one of the
world's earliest civilizations. The idea is that many software
developers are in the process of changing from a very ad-hoc
(hunter-gatherer) process to one that is more professional and
repeatable (a farming culture).
The analogy is that source code is like water. You need water for
life: one cannot start a farm in the desert. But, you need more than
water: there is plenty of water in an ocean or lake, but that is not
the best place to build a city. Ancient cities were almost always
built on rivers that brought fresh water and fertile silt, took
awaysewage, and provided transportation. Likewise, source code itself
is not enough: establishing a successful software development culture
requires many tools that influence the team's behavior.
The rivers can also symbolize traditions of thought: one river
represents open source, the other represents traditional software
engineering. The Tigris.org logo is in the shape of a "T", but it
also depicts the meeting of these two rivers. Open source has the
advantage of encouraging many ideas to be proposed and allowing
individuals to determine their own direction and affect the direction
of projects by scratching their own itches. Tradional software
engineering focuses on repeatability, scaling up to large projects,
and management of cost, schedule, and risks.
Latest Developments
- It turns our that the Sumerians were themselves software
developers. A recent excavation of an ancient "cube farm" has turned
up some very interesting artifacts. Tour the dig.
- Please discuss the dig on the dev mailing list: dev@dig.tigris.org
