NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.
All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
--Larry Wall
Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions on use Perl; are Copyright 1998-2006, their respective owners.
Successful projects are for developers (Score:1)
I remember Aaron Farr having some interesting
principles of free software project development.
One thing I think he said was that the most
successful ones involve developers. That is
they are producing software developers use.
I think he mentioned exceptions like OpenOffice.
One other thing he talked about was how
users become contributors.
I wish I could remember what he said.
alpha/beta/rc axiom? (Score:1)
While I'm not object to the point, I would like to have it somehow explained.
Other points are either self-explanatory, or simply obvious, but I don't immediately see why alpha/beta/rc releases are necessarily evil.
Re: (Score:1)
While I'm not object*ing* to the point...
Re: (Score:1)
In the first place, they're ineffective as tools for gathering feedback. There's no substitute for getting your software to actual users and hearing directly from them what works and what doesn't work.
Worse, I believe they're fundamentally at odds with the practice of done done [jamesshore.com]. If you get in the habit of releasing software with features you think probably aren't complete, you think are mostly complete, or you're pretty sure are com
Re: (Score:1)
So true! Though, at least you'll get smoker reports...
Re: (Score:1)
I prefer to get daily smoker reports from trunk and significant branches. Hourly reports are even better.
The shorter the period between an action and its feedback, the more you can learn from the experience and the faster you can correct an incorrect action.
Sensible (Score:2)
Book title: Open Source Project Management (Score:2)
It should include both how one can run an open source project - stuff you started to write in the journal but also other things such as
Re: (Score:1)
That's a good idea, especially the business perspectives. The most similar book is Karl Fogel's excellent Managing Open Source with CVS [red-bean.com], which doesn't go into this much detail on releases.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you sure you aren't thinking of Karl's "Producing Open Source Software" book?
http://producingoss.com/ [producingoss.com]
-- ask bjoern hansen [askbjoernhansen.com], !try; do();
Re: (Score:1)
Somehow I confused both into one book. Thanks for the correction!
Volunteers and "scut" work (Score:1)
From my experience managing my church's web team, people really don't mind menial work so long as the work is valued and appreciated, and doing the work is fun.
There were folk who would volunteers hours every month updating web site content, changing pictures, proofreading and checking for dead links. We'd get together at somebody's house, or a coffee shop with wifi, and just work.
Not only that, but menial tasks are a great way for people to get introduced to a project, and for them to do that at low risk.
Re: (Score:1)
Good point. There's a difference between the game development model of making everyone do tech support or manual QA before coding or design and having non-coding tasks available for interested volunteers. The latter can be enjoyable and rewarding.