The core idea of open source project is to give freedom to Developer and User and involve them in product development. 

Yesterday I read a book called “THE CATHEDRAL & THE BAZAR” by Eric S. Raymond. The book talks about the two models in which software development industry works. First one is the “Cathedral” model in which there is no transparency, it’s a closed system only specific people are allowed to work and another one is the “Bazaar” model where everything is transparent and open, anyone from anywhere can freely contribute.

As I have been working on an Open Source Project or Bazaar model of software development it was easy to relate to the lessons that Eric tries to explain in the book. Some of the lessons which I experienced while working in open source project are given below.

• “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.”

The idea of the Open Source WordPress plugin was initiated to solve a problem of sending auto generated invitation emails to the guest for the events that StartUp performs on every first Saturday of the month. Human Resources and Content Writer of StartUp who have been doing the task of sending the invitation email to the guests manually for quite a long time. The process was hectic and require a lot of time, to manage events and guests and also keeping their records it not easy task to perform. So the idea was to develop a WordPress Plugin where she can put all the data related to events and guests and then the plugin generates individual invitation emails for every guest. With the help of this plugin, she doesn’t have to worry to keep records and also didn’t have to write individual emails to every guest.

• Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

The initial release of the plugin with basic functionality was delivered within 17 days. The idea behind it was to get early feedbacks from the user in our case. With early feedback, you can track your project progress and also confirm that you are on right track or not.

• The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

After the initial release when HR used the plugin for sending emails she did find some technical glitch. As for now, the plugin was only able to send text elements with the emails but she mentioned that she also sends an event related poster with the invitation emails to the guest. It was a good idea of adding more elements with the email other than just text elements.

• Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging

Adding Image elements with the auto generated invitation emails was an add-on feature suggested by HR but not only that she also gives her opinion about the emails that are being sent to the guests. As for now, the emails are auto generating, the human touch was missing from them, they were very robotic in style, as it was an invitation to the guest not an advertising mail to the customers, the emails need to look less robotic in style.

Sample of auto-generated invitation email send by the plugin

So we discussed it with each other and come up with an idea of adding a feature where she will be able to edit the auto generated emails before it gets sent to the guest by the plugin.

With this feature, the missing human touch can be achieved.

These were some lessons from “THE CATHEDRAL & THE BAZAAR” which I able to relate with my journey while working in open source project.