Software Público Brasileiro

\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}

During the last few decades, the Brazilian Federal Government has
improved its software adoption and development processes. In 2003, the
recommendation to adopt Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) become a public
policy. In 2007, the Brazilian Government released a portal called
Brazilian Public Software (\textit{Software Público Brasileiro} -- SPB,
in Portuguese), with the goal of sharing FOSS projects developed by, or
for, the Brazilian Government.

The Brazilian legal instrument on software contracting
(\textit{Instrução Normativa} 04/2012) mandates that public management
must consult the SPB Portal to adopt a software solution. The
acquisition of a proprietary solution must be explicitly justified by
demonstrating that there is no suitable option in the SPB Portal.

Since 2009, however, the SPB Portal was having several technical issues.
The original codebase was not being developed anymore, and there as a
large amount of technical debt to overcome. The system was a modified
version of an existing FOSS platform that was not being developed
anymore, and the portal maintenance was becoming harder and harder.

From January 2014 to June 2016, a new platform for the SPB Portal was
designed and developed by the University of Brasília (UnB) and the
University of São Paulo (USP) in a partnership with the Brazilian
Ministry of Budget, Planning, and Management. This new Portal was
designed as an integrated platform for collaborative software
development. It includes functionality for social networking, mailing
lists, version control system, and source code quality monitoring. In
this paper, we present an overview of this new generation of the SPB
Portal.

The project was developed by a team of 3 professors, 6 professionals, 2
masters students, and approximately 40 undergrad students (not all of
them at the same time, though -- graduations and other events triggered
changes in the team).

\begin{figure}[hbt]
  \centering
    \includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth]{figures/home-SPB.png}
  \caption{The new SPB Portal.}
  \label{fig:spb}
\end{figure}

Figure \ref{fig:spb} shows the home page of this integrated platform.
The development tried to be as faithful as possible to FOSS development.
All development was done in the open, and the changes we needed in the
tools user were contributed back to their communities.