On 11/14/13 10:23 AM, Dejan Lekic wrote:
Scrum etc is for commercial software development. It does not really work for
Open Source
development, because people will always work on what they personally consider
most important and
most interesting. In the agile world there is a customer, who prioritizes work
items. This cannot
be applied here.
Bugzilla votes and stuff are nice to let devs know about bugs, but not
necessarily motivates to
fix them.
My Scrum experience tells me to humbly disagree because Scrum like all other
agile process tools is
all about experimentation. Almost all Scrum practices are applicable in
open-source world. No Scrum
team works the same as the other, they all have different ways of applying
Scrum (that is why it is
called a "process tool", not a methodology as many people use to call it).
Kanban is (IMHO) even more applicable in the open-source world as it has only
two prescribed
practices, the rest is up to the team to apply any agile practice they think
will help the project...
Take a look how "big open-source guys" do things. Their core team (typically
full-time employed)
works on whatever is on the sprint backlog, while contributors all around the
world take whatever
they like working on (with help of mentors quite often). So, it is possible to
have a nicely
organised open-source project, if people are willing to do so.
Which is pretty much exactly what we have. All the paid developers (no one) follow a core mission,
and all the volunteers scratch the itch they want to address the most.
More seriously, can you look at the linux kernel, or any of the major browser projects, or any of
the major gui tool kits, or... and find a nice clear list of what's going to be in them before they
release? Maybe close to the end of the release, but before or at the beginning of the cycle?
More organization would be nice, but let's not ascribe too much faith that we're all _that_
different from many other projects. I think a key difference is that we have so many more big
things that aren't near where we want them to be that it's easier to be unhappy.
