Towards Supporting Agile Practice Within The Libre Software Paradigm

Individual agile methods have never been practiced as defined, in the same way that Royce's waterfall [1] model never reflected actual practice. Instead, practitioners adapted the core principles of these processes in order to suit their needs. Understanding this is key to appreciating the agile mindset. What does exist is a set of principles1 which, when followed loosely, form the agile practices. It is an important part of the agile mentality that the individuals within a project are more important that the process they follow. However, the individual methods do have their own identifying features that make them unique; for example testing must be performed before coding within eXtreme Programming (XP) [2]. However, if practitioners were to apply XP, exactly as Beck describes it, then they are probably not “doing agile” as they may not be following the process that suits their needs best. One of the interesting features of the XP method is its requirement of a collocated team. This requirement is never particularly specified, but can be inferred from XP's lightweight nature coupled with its requirement of tight collaboration, such as pair programming. This requirement of a collocated team can limit the usefulness of XP in certain contexts, especially as it may not always be possible to have a customer always available on site for the development team. This is not acceptable as, within the agile mindset, the customer is just as much part of the development team as the programmers. This research is concerned with the effective distribution of agile practice and, in particular, the XP method. This abstract addresses a particular case study of this research, applying distributed XP within the libre software paradigm. The work described here will only play one small part of a larger programme of research, investigating the effective distribution of agile practice.