If Open Source is so great...

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Do you have any idea how many jira states our development workflow has?
I wonder how much appetite there is for project managers and scrum masters in the open source world.
- What's funny to me is, the agile approach seems like it's a much better fit for open-source, non-commercial software development.
  The corporate world and is management practices based around quarters and deadlines can't seem to see how anything could get done without deadlines, but that's usually less of a factor with open-source. People laugh at "scrum masters" because in a corporate environment, all the scrum stuff tends to be mostly performative. But it seems to me that open-source projects with multiple contributors already kind of work in an agile manner.
  
  I don't see the two environments as necessarily being at odds in any way.
  If implementing feature X is going to take a developer 10 days... It's going to take a developer 10 days. I can say the deadline is 1 day all I want, it's going to take 10 days.
  If I want to get my Volkswagen golf down a 1/4 mile, it doesn't matter how hard I push the gas pedal, it's going to take as long as it takes.
  In a corporate environment, if deadlines are what you're optimizing for, you have options. You can cut scope. You can add resources. You can decrease quality. You can forgo time intensive processes designed to reduce risk. These are still all agile activities. Making deliberate decisions, and continually evaluating those decisions is agile.
  Agile doesn't mean there are no timelines or goals. It's just that the design and implementation are routinely examined for suitability to your ultimate goals.
  So I actually think agile is better suited to corporate environments because of how volatile the definition of delivered value is. Open source projects usually have a less volatile vision

130 comments