Source Code Control Workflows for Open Source Software

Many open source projects rely on the dedicated and highly skilled members of distributed development teams. These teams often employ agile methods, as the focus is on concurrent development and fast production over requirements management and quality assurance. The image-guided surgical toolkit is an open source project that relies on the collaboration of a skilled distributed development team, yet addresses a safety-critical domain. Due to this rare intersection of agile and open source development processes and a safety-critical domain, the IGSTK team has had to enhance the process with key elements and a set of best practices to augment commonly applied agile methods. This paper presents our experiences and lays out some research questions for the future.