Open source software development

Methods

Fuggetta argues that “rapid prototyping, incremental and evolutionary development, spiral lifecycle, rapid application development, and, recently, extreme programming and the agile software process can be equally applied to proprietary and open source software”. He also pinpoints Extreme Programming as an extremely useful method for open source software development. More generally, all Agile programming methods are applicable to open-source software development, because of their iterative and incremental character. Other Agile methods are equally useful for both open and closed source software development: Internet-Speed Development, for example is suitable for open-source software development because of the distributed development principle it adopts. Internet-Speed Development uses geographically distributed teams to ‘work around the clock’. This method, mostly adopted by large closed-source firms, (because they're the only ones which afford development centers in different time zones), works equally well in open source projects because a software developed by a large group of volunteers shall naturally tend to have developers spread across all time zones.