Open Stack

These are good thoughts, but I don't think agile is necessarily in
opposition to open development. The crux of the perceived opposition,
IMHO, is that "agile" is often conflated with practices that only arise in
certain agile *methodologies*. The beauty of agile is that it's just a set
of 4 values backed by a handful of principles. It's up to software
developers to apply those values and principles in whatever way makes the
most sense under the circumstances.

That being said, there are two (possible) sticking points that arise when
examining the Twelve Principles of Agile Software:

1. Short release cycles are preferred. Operators take care of this for at
least a couple of projects, which get deployed continuously to customers;
certainly more frequently than once every 6 months. Given our constraints,
that may be the best we can do, but I think that¹s fine considering what
we gain, on the other hand, from the 6 month cycle for integrated releases.

2. Face-to-face communication is preferred. Basically, this is the point
of our design summits. The rest of the time we simulate being seated close
together with IRC and the mailing lists. I've also heard of some folks
having good success with TeamSpeak when communicating with large groups of
contributors within a single company. I'm not sure whether this would
scale to all contributors on a given project, using something like Mumble,
but it's something to consider. Anyway, I think the spirit of this
principle is to make communication as painless as possible given your
constraints, so again I don¹t see open development in conflict with agile
on this point.

When all is said and done, the best development methodology is a pragmatic
one. The key is to strive for continuous improvement based on real-world
observations ala the scientific method. I don't care what you call it; I
just care that it works. :D

-- 
@kgriffs

On 4/25/13 5:18 AM, "Thierry Carrez" <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:

>Stefano Maffulli wrote:
>> On 04/24/2013 11:40 AM, Monty Taylor wrote:
>>> I concur. There is actually, thus far, no existing solution that
>>>marries
>>> Agile with Open Source. It's possible you'll find something. :)
>> 
>> This thread reminds me a discussion I had 3 years ago at Funambol
>> 
>> http://maffulli.net/2009/03/20/scrum-and-volunteer-developers/
>
>If we are promoting blog posts, I might as well plug mine to the
>discussion:
>
>http://fnords.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/agile-vs-open/
>
>-- 
>Thierry Carrez (ttx)
>Release Manager, OpenStack
>
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