Reporting about the mod software process

Abstract

This short paper reports about the software process used for the development of CFS2 mods. CFS2 is the latest version of MS Combat Flight Simulator; a mod is a modification of the game that adds new features, fixes existing bugs, or enhances its performance. Mods are not developed by MS; indeed there is a wide community of enthusiastic fans of CFS2 – and smart programmers – that provide free mods through the Internet. This community is a completely anarchic one, but, if we carefully observe it, we discover a repeatable software process. The paper provides an inside report of such process and proposes several discussion issues about the differences between this particular context and the more known industrial one.