Hi!

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!

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agile · froscon · talk

In august I’m giving a talk on agile open source development. I have prepared an email with questions for open source projects that use or have tried agile techniques. If you know a project that may be interested to participate and get some coverage in the talk, please contact me at cornelis@pcornelissen.de

The talk will be in german, but after the conference, I’ll write a blog post here in english.

news · talk

I am watching the video of Alexandra Leisses talk at the Froscon 2009 with the title “Managing the Unmanageable”.

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!)

froscon · talk · video

I held a talk about things to consider, when you’re starting an open source project and what you can do to keep it alive. The talk is in german (sorry, no subtitles, but the talk is the insparation for this blog, so you can more or less read what I have talked about here). I have fixed the sound, because the microphone had some minor problems. There are a few minutes where the sound is a little bit crappy.

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

froscon · news · talk · video

For us developers, it’s easy to write the code, but that is not all a good project needs to do. You have to provide information on your project, the releases, the schedules and how to use your software. That’s a bunch of work, how can you fulfill the user expectations?
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early-phase · hosting · introduction · talk

Choosing the right scheme for the version numbers is not as easy as it sounds. There are many implications that you may not think of in the first place. Selecting a version scheme without thinking is like selecting a name without thinking and you don’t wouldn’t do that, would you?

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communication · early-phase · introduction · naming · release-planning · talk

early-phase · introduction · release-planning · talk

Sometimes people start to behave weird when they are in control or able to influence others. They act rude, or for example are mean to their users or project members… So, take a second and reflect if you are doing similar things and hurting your project and reputation.

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communication · early-phase · introduction · social-skills · talk

Your project published a few releases and a small developer team is forming. You’re still doing the communication and web site maintenance. Time for real development is becoming smaller and smaller. Are you doing it right? (more…)

early-phase · external-help · introduction · social-skills · talk

This blog post deals with the mistakes and opportunities you might encounter when you’re trying to integrate new people in the project. The problems range from a too high entrance barrier to overly caring project leads that suffocate new members…

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communication · early-phase · introduction · social-skills · talk

This article deals with the fun aspect of building a project team. There are many things you can profit from when you participate in a project. I am going to write about a few of them…

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communication · early-phase · introduction · social-skills · talk

This blog article deals with the question, where you might host your project. Whether self hosting, free hosting and if free hosting, where? There are somethings you should think about.

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early-phase · hosting · introduction · talk

This blog post deals with the problem of finding the right point in time to go public with your project. When should you write the first announcements, when and how to ask for help… When should you go public with your idea for a project? The sooner you go public, the sooner you’ll get people involved to help you. At least this is what you might think.

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introduction · starting-phase · talk

This article deals with the problem of choosing a suitable license for your project. I will talk a little bit about general topics that you should think about and after that I’ll introduce a few different license types. This won’t be a comprehensive decision guide, this field is too complex for that, but maybe the advices help you in deciding what kind of license you like.

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introduction · license · starting-phase · talk

This article will deal with the problem of finding the right name for your project. There are quite a few pitfalls that you have to take care of. For example free domains, names that can be translated in foreign languages to bad words etc.

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introduction · naming · starting-phase · talk