Agile Technologies in Open Source Development

This book approaches two contemporary topics in the field of software engineering that have had more than a significant impact in the way the modern software is being developed. Agile movement raised the role of experience and people in the centre stage having a profound impact on large and small software organizations alike. Research and practice have shown that agile is penetrating practically in all industrial domains including the globally operating, hardware-bound software development. Open source software development was considered to be outside of the scope of professional software development practice for long time. Companies perceived the voluntarily lead programming initiatives as something that could not be part of their strategic goal setting or daily practice. Today, a great majority of the companies utilize the open source solutions at many levels of the organization. The corporate strategies often include a plan where part of the software product has been opened for getting the benefits that are associated with the open source communities. There are many similarities in agile and open source movements. They have taken the field by surprise and gained a significant momentum that bear long lasting impact on the practice of software development. Both were initiated by a small group of practitioners. They are based on a value structure, which is far from the traditional technology orientation of many other software engineering innovations. Finally, the two approaches value people, collaboration, and excellence as the primary drivers of software development. This book shows you that open source and agile both deal with operational efficiency approaching it from different but mutually supporting angles. The authoring team has done a great job in highlighting the key differentiators and similarities of the two approaches. This book stands out from the others by presenting solid empirical evidence to support authors’ argumentation. Practitioners will find many suggestions and guidance, and they can also see the rationale behind these ideas, which further raises the value of this book.