XP and OpenSource

Dierk König
Canoo Engineering AG
Kirschgartenstr.7
CH-4051 Basel
Switzerland

mailto:dierk.koenig@canoo.com

XP seems to be impossible to apply to the OpenSource
Community, for the typical szenario does not allow
Pair Programming, shared planning, Customer On-Site
and the like. On the other hand some XP practices make
a lot of sense for OpenSource: Unit Tests, Acceptance Tests,
Continuous Integration, Refactoring. The Collective Code
Ownership is even the foundation of OpenSource.

I would like to contribute my experiences with
OpenSource and XP that I gathered when bringing up
the Canoo WebTest package. Beside the
experiences made with tools to support the
process, most of the experience concerns
group behaviour like:
- make users provide feedback
- make feature requesters provide acceptance tests
- make contributors provide tests and conform
to the Coding Standard.