Running FOSS Projects with Agile or How to Herd Cats

by Evan Leybourn on      Less than 1 minute read

Most project management methodologies are designed for commercial teams and products: a paid group of developers working on commercial products with corporate reporting, externally set milestones, and penalties for not completing on time. Open Source projects are usually completely different: unpaid volunteer developers working on products that they enjoy with minimal management, highly flexible milestones (if at all), and no penalties for not participating.

For these reasons being a community manager of an open source project takes very different skills from managing commercial projects. So how can structure and management be applied to this environment, and should you even try?

This session will look at a variety of methods from different agile methodologies that can (and can’t) be applied to open source projects including;

  • fixed duration iterations and releases,
  • daily stand-up,
  • Kanban,
  • test driven development,
  • feature driven design,
  • backlog and burndown, and
  • customer engagement (but who is the customer)