GForge Group
The GForge Group has grown over the last few years into a software business with some impressive customers like General Electric, IBM, Cisco Systems, Siemens, Raytheon and others. While GForge LLC initially started just as a company to host the GForge open source project, a number of people kept asking me to help them with their GForge setup and installation.
As sometimes happens to hobbies, they can eventually turn into your full-time job. Staff was added over the years, starting with sales guys and then more full-time programmers.
In 2005, we undertook the process to completely redesign GForge from scratch, knowing everything that we learned over the previous 6 years about how to do things -- and how NOT to do them. So we spent about 9 months quietly rewriting the whole thing from top-to-bottom.
The only way this was possible with a small team was to create a tool that could generate the custom framework for us. The sheer size and scope of the application meant that we couldn't manually write hundreds of forms, so one of my engineers, Marcelo Mottalli, spent 2 months writing a code generator tool that could build out all the forms and database interaction in a matter of seconds.
Problem Solved...
The GForge Story - Where GForge came from
Other GForge Group links:
ComputerWorld: Collaborative Development
IT Business: Canadian Government article
Agile Software Development
Dobbs Code Talk
GForge Group appliances
GForge Group Blog
OSVDB - GForge Group
Fedspending.org - GForge Group
Macraes Blue Book - Gforge Group
Government Contracts
Swik