Open Source and XP

[Greg Pfeil]

I use XP at work, but when I get home, I work on Open Source projects. The distributed nature of Open Source seems to make it the least likely candidate for XP. I haven't used any XP techniques in my Open Source programming, and don't really see an easy way to start doing so.
Am I right, are Open Source and XP incompatible, or can someone clue me in to what I'm missing?

[Frank Carver]

I don't think open-source by it's nature is incompatible with XP. O-S is about whether the source to a project is made available to its users, and an XP project can distribute the source just as easily as any other methodology. Many O-S projects, however, are very distributed and have very large developer teams, which certainly makes XP harder.
Some of the XP practices are a good fit for this sort of project, though. Unit testing and continuous integration have already been adopted by many of the successful O-S projects just to prevent them collapsing into chaos. Refactoring seems to be becoming popular too.

[martin fowler]

Open Source and XP are clearly different processes. However there is much about open source that is agile - which is why I included it in http://martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html
Of course many of the XP practices can be used in open source projects. I would certainly use Continuous Integration, the testing, the refactoring....
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Refactoring : Improving the Design of Existing Code
UML Distilled, Second Edition: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language
Analysis Patterns : Reusable Object Models
Planning Extreme Programming