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OSS Developers Provide A Glimmer of Hope
sebFlyte writes "In a recent speech at the ACCU conference in Oxford, software design guru James Coplein said that unless consumers start demanding more and putting up with less crap from software firms, the quality of proprietary software would keep spiralling down. He was full of praise for open source though, saying 'The complementary, independent, selfless acts of thousands of individuals can address system problems -- there are thousands of people making the system stronger.'"
I've been reading today about Iterative and Increment Design (IID) which is based around the principle of breaking a major project up into smaller iterations (of say 1-6 weeks) and at the end of each of these, integrating all the code and demonstrating it to the customer, whose feedback is used to adapt the product development in order to eventually end up with a final release which is useful.
It can even be taken as far as evolutionary delivery, which requires that the software be released into the market, and the feedback from that used to decide what will be in the next release. The time scales of this are much shorter than say, Apple releasing Panther and then Tiger, so not to be mixed up with major product releases.
I only wonder whether the success of Linux as a household brand is compromised by the fact that non-proprietory software does not follow IID and hence doesn't actually deliver what is the customer wants, but in fact what the developers think the customer wants. I know that Microsoft are very much for beta testing on thousands of individuals which is a step closer to this, but from the serious delays in Longhorn, it's also true that maybe they have missed the point as well.
There's no doubt the functionality is there in Linux as the guy mentions but I'm not so sure that the customer really fits into Linux like is required when moving beyond the waterfall model...