Open source projects have many advantages in terms of their management and processing. Let’s consider benefits of open source management from different perspectives.
Every Team Member Matters
Open source management puts a great deal of trust on the intelligence and alignment of the team members. The whole team as a union is a key to projects’ life, as well as every team member. Open source project success is completely dependent on how much team members care about it and contribute to its development.
Every member of an open source project team is an integral part of its success. Open source management approach gives team members more power for making decisions in their area of expertise. It is believed that every team member would make the best and quickest decision due to being much closer to the issues, challenges, and options. Team leader’s responsibility is to make all team members understand their overall goal and look at the problems holistically. Even though open source software development process seems to be less organized than the one used for proprietary software, it has one crucial benefit: team members have much more freedom for organizing their work. They can focus on doing the work, but not on spending much time on needless reporting of every single step to the superiors, presenting their strategies or explaining what they are going to do and how.
Developers Community
What is absolutely unique for open source communities is the way people can work together to achieve unbelievable results for a short time period.
There are so-called ‘sprints’ organized, where developers from different parts of the world gather to effectively work and come up with good results for the shortest time period. Such sprints make significant step forward for big projects. Normally maintained by several people, such projects can get to the highest development level with help of dozens developers who temporarily work for one goal.
This is one more benefit of using open source software: the speed with which open source technology is getting improved. Being contributed by great number of co-developers, open-source software has any emerging problems solved far faster than it is done for single-person-managed one.
Methodology
Companies that actively work with open source technologies use different methodologies to manage their projects. Sometimes extreme programming and/or agile methods work, but sometimes they don’t. For such cases, companies use custom methods that they consider the most effective, based on the long period of work with peculiar client.