Why Open Source Software?

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Have you ever imagined a world where technology is restricted to only those people who are willing to pay for closed source products? It would severely affect people’s education and many researches. It would also be hard to share information with other people. Fortunately, we don’t live in such world. Today, we have many open source software products which lead us to new technologies. They are easily available to everyone and they are cost-effective. They bring benefits to our society by giving opportunities to people to use and understand the open source software.

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So what make open source software products different from closed software products? Well, they are not in terms of programming language or operating systems, but by the license that governs the use of open source software products. That is the reason why most of the open source software products are licensed under general public license (GPL). We can look and/or modify the source code from its original design, free of charge. In my opinion, this is the best part of open source products. For example, Linux is licensed under GPL. You can look at the source code and modify the original source code. 

In my opinion, following are some key advantages of open source software products: 

• They are considerably less expensive when compared with closed software products.
• They are safe to use.
• Since they are not owned by a vendor, there is no vendor lock-in.  
• They deliver better quality. 
• We get right to access and modify the source code.  

Overall, I believe that open source software products will bring more innovations to the future.

Source:
http://www.mmmlaw.com/assets/files/article_238.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software

Why Agile Project Management?

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If you were to start a software development company, then the most important part is to satisfy customer needs. You might want to deliver high quality products faster to compete with other companies. But the question is how you can make high quality products in less time and deliver faster. Well, the answer is quite simple - through agile project management. It is becoming a new way of working in many IT companies. Agile project management takes care of customer needs. It is about managing any particular task efficiently by collaborating with all employees. To be more specific, it divides the responsibilities of any particular project among all the team members for faster results. 

Now you might be interested to know the benefits of using agile project management. There are numerous benefits, but I will focus on some key important ones. Firstly, it delivers solutions frequently. Secondly, it is very effective for software development companies because changes in the requirement of product happens quite often due to various reason. Thirdly, it assures a solution because agile project management involves more interactions with customers and more iterations to maximize feedback. Lastly, through agile project management, you can quickly produce more solutions of better quality products with very less defects and reduced risks.

In agile project management, there are various agile approaches available. However, the most popular agile approaches XP and Scrum. Below is the brief outline of XP and Scrum:

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XP (extreme programming): XP is more focussed on the process of software development rather than management of software project. It includes programming in pair and often integration of changes in software development.

 

Scrum: Scrum is very popular because of its simplicity. It is an easy way to start working on any particular project. Moreover, it focuses on software management where work is distributed to all team members to reach a common goal.

Overall, I believe that agile project management is becoming important when it comes to software development because it provides a flexible and controlled environment to deliver solutions.

Source:
http://www.dsdm.org/sites/default/files/Agile-PM-White-Paper.pdf