Monday, July 12, 2010

Maturity of open source projects

In my work as an IT consultant I sometimes use open source projects as reference for judging the quality and maturity of in-house or commercial software projects. Task Coach, for example, has more than 3500 automated unit tests that cover 63% of the 100.000 Python lines of code. Since Task Coach is just a hobby project, this in my mind makes it a lower boundary for assessing the amount and coverage of unit tests in other projects.

Last week I was attending the official Introduction to the CMMI course taught by André Heijstek (of Improvement Focus). While we were discussing the different process areas in the CMMI for Development, I started wondering if and how CMMI would apply to open source organizations and projects. Maybe the CMMI doesn't apply to open source projects at all. However, if a project like Task Coach does achieve a significant portion of the CMMI goals, then that would be another stick in the ground to compare other organization and projects against.

So, the plan is to investigate which of the CMMI for Development v1.2 (and Services too probably; user support is an integral part of open source projects) goals are met by the Task Coach organization and project. Since there are many CMMI process areas I will assess each of the CMMI process areas in a separate posting. As I'm obviously biased, I'll invite André, who is a certified lead appraiser for CMMI, to review my assessments.

4 comments:

André Heijstek said...

I'll be happy to comment ;-)
I won't do a full SCAMPI A though, the minimum requirement of a four person team seems somewhat overdone in this case.
In any case this will be somewhat funny. In judging your maturity I will have to fully rely on what you are saying/writing. Of course, the same is mostly true in real appraisals, but there I would take the initiative in asking questions. Now you have the initiative in telling me what you think is important.
But, I trust you want to provide me an honest picture, so I think it will work.

Sander said...

Sounds like a great idea Frank! I'm very curious of the outcome!

Harish said...

It has been 4 years since this post, and am wondering if there has been any progress you'd like to share?

Thanks.

Frank said...

Did you see my other posts in 2010? Those report on the results of the maturity analysis.

I've not been actively involved with the Task Coach project since 2012 so I have no recent experiences to share.