This is something that the closed source development world has found to be one of the most difficult and costly aspects of software development. The public nature of open source helps developers take pride in their successes and think twice before releasing faulty code. Furthermore, debugging is an activity that is more effective when split among many people who have diverse knowledge Build and Test Management Development activity on open source projects is constant and concurrent among many developers. Sometimes the changes made by one developer interfere with those made by another developer. Often the version control practices used in the open source community resolve these conflicts, but sometimes they do not.
Every project needs explicit goals, resources, and a schedule.
The open source community has addressed these issues in a uniquely flexible way. Milestone lists set flexible deadlines for individual features based on feedback from users and developers Knowledge Management Knowledge is the valuable resource that sets experienced developers apart from novice ones. Sharing knowledge effectively has been key to the success of the open source community. Explicitly managing knowledge can help reduce the learning curve for novices which reduces the barriers to entry for potential contributors while automatically keeping the load on the experts down to a minimum in terms of training others.