* Selecting an open source program.
* Tools training.
* Develop a benchmark and set the baseline. The benchmark should be fully automated, repeatable, should represent the functionality of the app and should take significant amount of time (about one minute) to enable progress monitoring.
* Analyze the performance, identify time breakdown hot spots.
* Understand the reason for the performance (HW events).
* Define optimization strategy. (SIMD, threading ...)
* Optimization work and benchmarking the results.
* Documentation of the work. Publishing a paper, documenting the code changes and trying to submit the code back to the open source community.
... ...
Why not involving them
»Forward Agency NPO
In progress we (always) trust.
Well, yes, that migth be a good idea ones the project reach the maturity level where people really use ReactOS. Code that are constantly changeing isn't in need for too much tuning. ReactOS needs stability more then speed, but in time this is really good.