Coding Horor: “Is Eeyore Designing Your Software?”:

Here’s my honest question: does open source software need all that process to be successful? Isn’t the radical lack of process baggage in open source software development not a weakness, but in fact an evolutionary advantage? What open source software lacks in formal process it makes up ten times over in ubiquity and community. In other words, if the Elbonians feel so strongly about localization, they can take that effort on themselves. Meanwhile, the developers have more time to implement features that delight the largest base of customers, instead of plowing through mountains of process for every miniscule five line code change.

Are large commercial software companies crippled by their own process?

I’d say that in large corporations, I’ve seen many internal projects beat down by the same.

The new portal architecture at CIM doesn’t suffer from this, but the old one certainly did. We’ve come a long way.