Agile development practices were initially designed to work with smaller co-located teams, but these practices begin to break down when applied to large and/or distributed teams. With this said, open source projects have managed to be Agile with hundreds to thousands of contributors across multiple time zones.

So how can Agile learn from open source projects? On November 3, 2011, Andy Singleton, CEO of Assembla, spoke at the Agile New England event on ‘What Agile can Learn from Open Source.” Below is a video of Andy’s presentation as well as the slides. Enjoy. 

Watch the presentation:

View/download the slides:

View on Slideshare | Download

 Andy's notes:

About halfway through, I started talking about scaling projects, and I made some claims that caused active rebellion in the audience. That's awesome when you consider that this audience is composed of corporate agile people who specialize in calmly coming to consensus. I said that the Mythical Man Month is wrong (it turns out that at least one audience member studied with the author), and that it's a good idea to let people go around dependencies by duplicating work, because that way the worst delay is a 50% reduction in productivity, which is much better than most large projects, etc.  It's a fun subject that is worth more debate.

At the end, I present "Release Driven Development." This is my synthesis of the agile process that people actually end up with when they try out Scrum but know how open source projects work. It's a lot like Scrum, but with a twist. Instead of doing iteration planning at the beginning (this is hard, almost nobody does it well, doesn't scale), you do what open source projects do and assemble the release at the END, including or "accepting" components that are ready to meet your quality standards. This improves scalability, saves time, and gives more time for design and quality control. We're going to do a lot more with RDD.  Check out the last few slides in the slideshare deck above for a description.