Tag: Evergreen
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What’s wrong in software product line engineering? The separation of the platform as a cost center from the product units as profit centers
In three previous posts I had reported about our research into problems with product line engineering. Three important specific problems (of several more) were: In all three cases (and then some), the underlying problem was the separation of the platform organizational unit as a cost center from the product organizational units as profit centers. Product…
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Commercial open source in the cloud
Update 2018-10-16: MongoDB is facing the same problem and decided to go closed source, see the press release. The brouhaha around Redis Labs taking some enterprise modules of its popular open source in-memory database Redis closed source has somewhat calmed down. However, I didn’t see any discussion of what I thought was the most interesting…
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If GitHub was like Berlin…
Much open source research assumes that all open source projects are alike and that if you take enough of them, you can claim generalizability for your conclusions. GitHub is the main source of such mischief, because of its size and availability. If GitHub was like Berlin, and projects on GitHub were like the people of…
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There is no (Scrum) product owner
One of the most difficult aspects of Scrum is the role of the product owner. Most software vendors have a product management function, typically split into strategic and technical product management. Technical product management is usually equated with Scrum’s product owner role, that is, the guy or gal who writes business-value-oriented user stories and epics,…
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Agile feature teams vs. inner source
Agile methods reacquainted developers with the idea of working from business value rather than focusing on technical concerns only. Agile methods are therefore often equated with feature-driven development, in which work is driven by features prioritized by business value irrespective of technical consequences. This thinking can create code silos and wreak havoc on software architecture…
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Paid vs. volunteer open source work in China 1 / 3
In 2014 we published a study on paid vs. volunteer work in open source, using a representative sample of open source projects from 2008 (i.e. before GitHub). In 2008, open source activity was decidedly Western, with little contributions from China. In 2017, I finally found a student to redo the analysis for China. More specifically,…