1. Open development management and practices in a distributed team Ross Gardler OSS Watch Service Manager [email_address] http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk Topic Tag: OSSWatch-OpenDevelopment

• Unless otherwise indicated, all materials in this presentationare 2008 University of Oxford

and are licensed under theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales licence .

2. Overview

Who Are OSS Watch?

Who is Ross Gardler?

What is Open Development?

Essential Processes

Essential Tools

Advanced Processes and Tools

3. Who Are OSS Watch?

JISC funded open source software advisory service(non-advocacy)

Online and Face to Face support

• Licencing and IPR management

• Open source project support

• Evaluating and using open source

Briefing notes and consultations

4. Who is Ross Gardler?

Open source developer

• Member of The Apache Software Foundation

Joined OSS Watch in Jan 2007

Service Manager in July 2007

My focus is on open source for sustainability

5. Overview

Who Are OSS Watch?

Who is Ross Gardler?

What is Open Development?

Essential Processes

Essential Tools

Advanced Processes and Tools

6. Open development is... A way for distributed team members tocollaboratively develop a shared resource 7. Open Development...

Particularly useful in distributed self selecting teams

• Very common in open source projects

Key attributes include:

• User engagement

• Transparency

• Collaboration

• Agility

8. Is it Agile Development? Yes, but No, but Yes, but No, but... 9. No

Some Agile methods are not appropriate

• e.g. Does not require co-location

Does allow anyone to participate

• NOTE: this does not mean that anyone has therightto modify open source code in the core repository

10. Yes

Many agile practices evolved from or alongside open development, e.g.

• Collective code ownership

• Incremental design and architecture

• Real customer involvement

• Revision Control

11. Overview

Who Are OSS Watch?

Who is Ross Gardler?

What is Open Development?

Essential Processes

Essential Tools

Advanced Processes and Tools

12. Communication

If it didn't happen on the list, it didn't happen

Face to face meetings produce proposals

• Decisions are made on mailing lists

Transparency

• No hidden agenda

13. Management

Progression through project roles

• User -> Contributor -> Committer -> Maintainer

Governance

• How are decisions made?

• How are conflicts resolved?

• How do you gain influence?

IPR management

14. Quality Control

Small reversible steps

Managing contributions

• Commit then review

• Review then commit

Test Driven Development

No tests or documentation, no commit

15. User Engagement

Today's users may be Tomorrows contributor

Release early, release often

Managing user expectations

Capturing user testing (bug reports)

Capturing user needs (feature requests)

16. Recognition & Reward

Those who contribute to us are as selfish as anybody else. There's rarely any charitable aspect of this.- Marten Mickos, (Sold MySQL for $1B)

Recognise why people contribute

• A better solution for themselves

Reward all forms of contribution

• Peer recognition is valuable

17. Overview

Who Are OSS Watch?

Who is Ross Gardler?

What is Open Development?

Essential Processes

Essential Tools

Advanced Processes and Tools

18. Web Site

Mission statement

Non technical overview

• Status

• Licence

• Communication channels

Downloads

Screenshots and Screencasts

19. Documentation

Users

• Getting started

• FAQ

Developers

• Technical overview

• Version Control

• How to get involved

20. Mailing Lists or Forums

All lists/forums archived

• Project memory

• Documentation

Developers List

• technical discussion

• developer support

• Project management

21. Other lists/forums?

Do you really need others?

Don't split your small audience

You may need

• Users list for user support

• Commit notifications

• Management list for sensitive issues

• • Be careful transparency is everything

22. Issue Tracker

Project management

Project road map

User feature requests

Activity tracking

All changes mailed to developer list

Patch management

23. Revision Control System

Coordinate multiple developers

Project time machine

Reverse mistakes

IPR Management

Enables experimental development

All changes mailed to developer list

24. Overview

Who Are OSS Watch?

Who is Ross Gardler?

What is Open Development?

Essential Processes

Essential Tools

Advanced Processes and Tools

25. Do youreallyneed it?

Tools are not the answer to a failing process

Process is not the answer to a failing project

Before adding new tools or processes thinkDo youreallyneed it?

26. Adding value

Remove don't add barriers

• Aim for participation

Tools that reduce effort = good

• Continuous Integration

• Patch management

Tools that increase effort = bad(?)

27. Be Realistic, Be Sensible

Building an open development project takes time

• they won't come flocking

• You will talk to yourself in the early days

Start as you mean to go on

• Lead by example, others will follow

Encourage everyoneto help new users

28.

Thank you for listening

[email_address]

www.oss-watch.ac.uk

Ross Gardler

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