The topic below is a wiki post that anyone can edit, by clicking the ‘edit’ button on the toolbar.
What constitutes the FSDL?
Objective of the wiki post below is to find ways to break down the FSDL into manageable chunks for which Challenges and Patterns can be defined. It is a brainstorm and need not be well-structured. Cleaning up, filtering and shifting can come later.
The idea is to find an intuitive breakdown structure that can be used to structure the Social Coding website. In a later stage we might be able to create a comprehensive documentation framework for the FSDL that can be easily crowdsourced and extended.
Some inspirations highlighting similar breakdowns into a pattern language:
Just list anything with relation to software development, even though they may be less applicable directly to FOSS, or have less applicable names (e.g. ‘business modeling’ or ‘stakeholders’). Finding appropriate terminology is for a future exercise
Ideation
Business modeling
Stakeholder management
Domain modeling
Requirements gathering / elicitation
Product management
User experience
Roadmapping
Licensing
Project management
Funding / grant writing
Task management / Issue tracking
Architecture design
Architecture notebook
Techstack / software selection
Implementation / coding
Development tools
Revision control
Patches / Pull requests
Code review
Quality assurance
Coding standards
Documentation standards
Testing
Packaging
Supply-chain packaging
Ecosystem
Strategic alliance
Community management
Formation
Onboarding
Governance
Contributing
Growth
Sysops
Deployment / Installation
CI / CD
Administration
Advocacy / PR
Project website
Personal work methods
End of Life
Archiving
Forking
The ‘deliverables’ axis
It becomes increasingly clear that besides the Lifecycle itself, there is another axis for which to track challenges and collect best-practices. This axis relates to the perspective of the FOSS project deliverables. In terms of Social Coding Principles they relate more to the GEM Practices.
Lacking a proper name for this axis yet, a list of these aspects:
Diversity
Accessibility
Software Transparency
Discussion
There are likely different ways to slice the FSDL, different perspectives to take. The Rational Unified Process for instance focuses on different processes and when they apply wrt the lifecycle of the project, as seen in the following diagram:
Maybe these SLDC’s (at least commonly used ones) should be listed in the Pracititioners Guide under “Challenge: Finding the right process”.
A “Diversity Guide for Small Organizations” is discussed (French & English) & drafted
There is a lot of overlap to Social Coding Movement. If the guide cannot be direct part of FSDL (see: The ‘deliverables’ axis above), then maybe this project wants to be under the co-shared community umbrella (see draft doc on what that entails).
July 2025 depiction of FSDL
The SX Free software development lifecycle has 5 evolution stages: inception, ideation, realization, delivery, dispersal. The first 4 lead to value creation, while the first 3 comprise solution design. Ideation and realization are where the majority of what we currently consider to be “software development” takes place.
