Increasingly I've been wondering whether these agile approaches might be a detriment to most open source projects.
There is a massive pool of talented and motivated programmers that could contribute to open source projects, much more massive than any company's engineering dept, yet most projects follow a power law where a few contributors write all the code.
I think eschewing processes and documentation in favour of pure programming centered development, where tests & code serve as documentation and design tools, means the barrier to entry is much higher, and onboarding new members is bottlenecked by their ability to talk with the few main contributors.
The most successful open source projects have a clear established process for contributing and a lot of documentation. But the majority don't have anything like that, and that's only exacerbated by git hosting platforms that put all their emphasis on code over process. I wonder whether setting up new tools around git allowing for all projects to follow the waterfall or a V-cycle might improve the contribution inequality.
There is a massive pool of talented and motivated programmers that could contribute to open source projects, much more massive than any company's engineering dept, yet most projects follow a power law where a few contributors write all the code.
I think eschewing processes and documentation in favour of pure programming centered development, where tests & code serve as documentation and design tools, means the barrier to entry is much higher, and onboarding new members is bottlenecked by their ability to talk with the few main contributors.
The most successful open source projects have a clear established process for contributing and a lot of documentation. But the majority don't have anything like that, and that's only exacerbated by git hosting platforms that put all their emphasis on code over process. I wonder whether setting up new tools around git allowing for all projects to follow the waterfall or a V-cycle might improve the contribution inequality.