SPRUCE: A web portal for collaborating on solutions to software producibility challenge problems

Scientific and ensuing technology advances are typically achieved in an effort to solve a well-defined problem. We believe that a primary contributor to the continuing problems in developing large, software-intensive systems for the DoD within schedule and budget is a lack of well defined, DoD specific software producibility challenge problems to drive software engineering research. In this paper, we describe SPRUCE, an open web portal to bring together DoD software developers, users and software engineering researchers by collaborating on specifying and solving software producibility challenges. We describe SPRUCE´s concept of operations designed to capture challenge problems and motivate a community to pursue solutions. We describe SPRUCE´s key features including: (1) self-organizing communities-of-interest, (2) dynamically evolving challenge problems with accompanying artifacts, and (3) built-in experimentation facilities to reproduce the problems and evaluate solution benchmarks. Finally, we demonstrate early experiences and results with representative communities of interest and challenge problems.