InfoQ

News

Benefits and Challenges of Open Source for Agile Teams

Posted by Deborah Hartmann on May 20, 2006 05:16 PM

Community
Agile
Topics
Open Source
Tags
Complementary Practices
Combining open source resources with a team's Agile best practices can quickly yield some truly amazing results .Jeff Hodson recently wrote: to sustain these successes, teams must apply an architectural-centric approach in order to realize longevity, flexibility and independence in the application. His article Supercharge Your Application Development Open Source Strategy with an Architecture-centric Approach appeared in AgileJournal earlier this month.

Leveraging open source technologies has had a significant positive impact on both the development and runtime environments of software applications. Teams using this advantage find they are better able to deliver applications with expected functionality within timeframes acceptable to interested stakeholders. When given the option to choose between open source widget v1.0 or its commercial v1.0 equivalent, early released versions of open source software tend to be better tested and market-proven than their commercial counterparts.

But, of course, there are trade-offs. Hodson's article addresses developers' concerns about the challenges posed by open source software, including:
  • Community-based support structure is different from the more familiar commercialized software environments.
  • Sporadic release cycles
  • Contribution management: the luxury of the having access to open source code can be a double-edged sword and assumes a certain amount of responsibility and accountability.
  • Fluid project roadmaps: features, enhancements and fixes targeted for a particular release are rarely committed to well beforehand.
  • New Technologies: if it is not well understood internally it can have a detrimental effect on the developer's efforts going forward.
  • Extra-functional requirements: constraints and boundaries placed on an application due to certain open source ingredients.
Hodson has over 20 years of experience in delivering market proven real-time enterprise applications for the financial and telecommunications industries. He writes that "By applying an architecture-centric approach a developer's open source strategy can successfully address the challenges of open source software.".

His article looks at Using Architecture To Address Open Source Challenges, including Architectural Style, Architectural Framework the following Best Practices: Agile-centric development; Component-based development; Single purpose application of open source; Separation of concerns.

Related Sponsor

VersionOne is recognized by Agile practitioners as the leader in Agile project management tools. Companies such as Adobe, BBC, CNN, Dow, HP, IBM, Sony and 3M have turned to VersionOne to help deliver greater value to their customers.

No comments

Watch Thread Reply

Educational Content

Bindings, Platforms, and Innovation

This presentation focuses on the Internet and separating myth from fact, history from the future, and the mundane from the imaginative. Bob Frankston presents a vision of what could and should be.

  •  Jul 02, 2009,
  •  

Orchestrating Long Running Activities with JBoss / JBPM

This article explores the use of JBoss and jBPM to implement design solutions that effectively address the issue of orchestrating long running activities.

  •  Jul 01, 2009,
  •  

Neo4j - The Benefits of Graph Databases

This presentation covers the use of graph databases as an optimal solution for data that is difficult to fit in static tables, rapidly evolving data or data that has a lot of optional attributes.

Realistic about Risk: Software development with Real Options

This session introduces Real Options and shows how it can help in running your project. Real Options is a decision-making process that can be used to manage risk.

  •  Jun 30, 2009,
  •  

Communication Flexibility Using Bindings

This article discusses the use of bindings on services and references (including the instance of non-configured bindings) as the means to implement SCA communications in a Web and SOA environment.

  •  Jun 30, 2009,
  •  

Writing DSLs in Groovy

After a short introduction to DSLs, Scott Davis plays with the keyboard showing how to approach the creation of a DSL by typing working snippets of Groovy code that get executed.

Scaling Agile with C/ALM (Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management)

IBM Rational and InfoQ present, Scaling Agile with C/ALM, an eBook showing organizations how to become “finely tuned software delivery machines” by enabling team integration and scaling.

Concurrent Programming with Microsoft F#

Amanda Laucher presents a real life enterprise application written in F#. She shows actual code snippets, explaining design decisions and suggesting how to use some of the F# constructs.