I you are like me you love open source software. Open source software is a driving force propelling proprietary software to increase functionality while maintaining costs. We can look at Nagios and Tivoli for a comparison. Nagios is adding functionality and providing the organizations with more flexibility than Tivoli in many respects.

WordPress is another great open source project for creating a blog. However, there might be rocky roads ahead for the organization. The fall from grace will come from a bloated core development team and the lack of QA for plugins. Basically, instability in the software.

Instability has resulted in several open source software failures. A reason why many organizations will not use open source software is due to instability within the core development team and the lack of quality assurance. An enterprise cannot afford to implement software within the business model and have the software crash due to poor quality assurance.

How does an open source software team implement quality assurance. One way is to reduce the development to a core group. We see this strategy used with many game related software development. Another method is to close the core to additional plugins until they have be QA’d by the core and thoroughly tested. We see this with open source software like Apache and Nagios. We have also seen this with major operating system vendors, like Microsoft and RedHat, in regard to kernel source code.

WordPress is still the number one open source blogging software on the market today. There needs to be more quality assurance within the project to ensure the core is hardened and nothing is introduced to break that base functionality. Open source communities need to also be concerned with the stability of their base product before adding additional functionality. Do not be afraid to tell a plugin developer “NO” to his or her code.

I hope this helps to enlighten people to the need to hem-in scope creap before the product falls from grace and another product takes the market share.

Mike Kniaziewicz
Master of Information Systems