In FarmVille (http://farmville.com/), a wildly popular online social networking game, players manage a virtual farm with their friends by planting, growing, and harvesting crops and trees, and raising livestock for both individual and collective rewards. Friends can send resources--“gifts”--to each other to help their farms grow.

Similarly, this paper describes the small project observatory (SPO), a promising experimental tool that enables project managers, development managers, and quality assurance managers to harvest valuable but sticky software management knowledge from another kind of farm--a software ecosystem. According to the authors, a software ecosystem is a collection of software projects that develop and evolve in the same environment--a typical situation in organizations that manage portfolios of software products [1] or programs of projects [2]. The SPO ingests project and artifact information from a software repository, and it provides a Web-based interface to query and extract knowledge about software projects and resources in an ecosystem.

After reading this research, project managers, development managers, and quality assurance managers will be in two opposing emotional states. First, they will be ecstatic about the potential for the SPO to provide insight on how to strategically allocate development resources [3]. Then, they will be depressed when they learn that the SPO is, much like FarmVille, still in beta.

In summary, I can’t wait to see a commercial version. Also, every farm in FarmVille needs the SPO.