We all know that Scrum works very well for a traditional team where team members come into work each week/sprint, agree goals and meet commitments.
However open source projects are often very different:
- People tend not to work on Open Source projects full time
- While some projects have a group of core contributors many pull requests are ad-hoc with people submitting pull requests which most likely won’t contribute to any agreed sprint goal
- Communities are often run via messaging systems, blogs, and forums rather than formal meetings like plannings sessions, retrospectives, and sprint reviews
- The direction of projects is often more of a democracy (or whoever contributes the most) rather than being focused by a Product Owner
Do these differences mean the scrum methodology cannot be applied to an open source project or do adjustments need to be made?