I am preparing a talk, that I will give at an open source conference in august (http://www.Froscon.org). The topic is “agile open source development” and I’m looking for projects that like to participate and help me to gather some data about agile techniques in these projects.
Often projects don’t realize that they use agile techniques, so it would be nice if you and/or the team could answer the questions and send me an email to cornelis@pcornelissen.de and place your project name and “[TALK]” in the subject, so my mail filters can mark the mails accordingly.

There are no wrong answers and it’s completely ok, if your project does not use any of the mentioned techniques!

To be able to use the data for the talk it would be nice if you could send me the reply before the 20th of july. If you can’t make it for that date, I can use it nevertheless, because I’m going to write a blog entry after I gave the talk about the topic.

I’d like to thank you in advance for your time and effort! If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

If you are involved in multiple projects, feel free to send me multiple replies to this mail. You may also send this to other people/projects you know, if you think they might want to participate.

BTW: I am also interested in negative experiences with certain techniques or agile development as a whole (in the context of open source projects).

The survey won’t take long and I’ll give credit to each project in the talk and the blog post, that I’ll write afterwards!

Let’s start:

1. Would you like to get your project mentioned in the talk? (Otherwise I won’t mention the project, just the results)

2. How many project members also work in software development in their “regular” job? (The regular job may as well be to work on the project)

3. Is your project based in a company?

4. Do you use agile project management processes like Scrum, eXtreme Programming, lean development or similar?

5. Are you using timeboxed releases? (Releases every x months for example like Gnome or Ubuntu)

6. Are you doing retrospectives after a release or at all in your project?

7. Are you using a version control system? (CVS,SVN,GIT,…) Which one? Are you using branches etc. or only one line for development?

9. Are you writing unit tests for your code? (junit, phpunit,…) Are you doing automated UI-tests? (With for example Selenium)

10. Are you doing peer reviews of new code? If this is the case, are you doing it only for new developers or for “old devs” too?

11. If you are writing unit tests, do you also do continous integration on a daily or per checkin basis?

12. Are you doing early releases or fast iterations to get your code as soon as possible to your users or do you have rather long release cycles?

13. Is there collective code ownership or do you have code that only one or a few people are “allowed” to touch? How many people are able to make changes everywhere? (how good is codebase known to the team)

14. Are you using a bug-/tasktracker to handle user requests like bug reports or feature requests? Which one?

15. How are you planning your releases? Do they just “materialize” or do you use user stories or similar techniques to plan your iterations/releases?

14. How are you documenting your project? (Inline documentation like Javadoc, Wiki, Tasktracker like Bugzilla/Jira,…)

15. Do you have regular team meetings like “daily standup” meetings (which are of course difficult in distributed teams)? Maybe scheduled IRC meetings or constant communication via chat,IM,Skype,…?

16. Are there chances for face to face communication in the project for example via team meetings in real life?

17. Are there developers who are co-located (or at least live close to another, so they can meet if necessary)

18. Are you using pair programming via internet or co-location?

19. Are there any other things you’d like to mention in context of agile development and your project?

Thanks for your time!

You can download it at:

ftp://ftp.stw-bonn.de/pub/froscon/2009/prerelease_please_do_not_redistribute/sa/hs12/…

It is a nice talk and worth watching! (Language is english!)

See the video here: Froscon “Open Source Projekte starten und am Leben halten” auf Vimeo