...or Top-down versus Bottom-up approaches to content design.
In his 1997 essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar, open source evangelist Eric S. Raymond suggests that
the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.Raymond considers the development of software by traditional methodologies as analogous to building a mediaeval cathedral,
carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.He asserts that all software could be developed using the bazaar approach, which he described as
a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches... open to the point of promiscuity.
In this so-called Bazaar Model, roles are not clearly defined. Gregorio Robles suggests that software developed using the Bazaar model should exhibit the following patterns:
- Users should be treated as co-developers
- Early Releases
Frequent Integration
New code should be integrated as often as possible so as to avoid the overhead of fixing a large number of bugs at the end of the project life cycle. Some open source projects have nightly builds where integration is done automatically on a daily basis.
- Several Versions
- High Modularization
- Dynamic decision making structure
There is a need for a decision making structure, whether formal or informal, that makes strategic decisions depending on changing user requirements and other factors (i.e. in extreme programming).
In Raymond's view, most well-known OSS products including Linux, Apache, and the GNU Compiler Collection align with the Bazaar model.
In the 'traditional' Cathedral model (advocated in Fredrick P. Brooks, Jr. in The Mythical Man-Month), development takes place in a centralized fashion. Clearly defined roles including experts dedicated to designing (the architects), established management styles, and 'craftsmen' (developers) responsible for implementation all contribute build a pre-established design according to a pre-agreed blueprint.
He goes further to say that in order to preserve the architectural integrity of a system, its design should be done by as few architects as possible.
Interestingly, the Bazaar model comes close (in manifestation, if not in philosophy) to what Brooks in the 1995 Anniversary edition of his text describes as "shrink-wrapped software." Brooks suggests:
For the developer in the shrink-wrapped industry, the economics are entirely different from those of the classical industry... the starkly different economies have given rise to starkly different programming cultures.(p.284)
Rather than the traditional Cathedral model,
The shrink-wrapped industry... [is] freewheeling and fiercely focused on getting the job done rather than on process. in this climate, there has always been a much greater recognition of the talent of the individual programmer, an implicit awareness that great designs come from great designers [my italics]. The start-up culture has the capability of rewarding star performers in proportion to their contributions... [i]t is not surprising that many of the stars of the new generation have gravitated to the shrink-wrapped industry.(p.284)
More tomorrow as I discuss towards the implications of these two models for the e-learning industry.
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References:
Brooks, R.P. (1995). The Mythical Man-Month Anniversary Edition London, Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.
Raymond, E. S. (2000). The Cathedral and the Bazaar Version 3, Revision 1.57 [Internet] Available from: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/
cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ [Accessed 22nd August 2009]
Robles, G. (2004) A Software Engineering approach to Libre Software, IN: Robert A. Gehring, Bernd Lutterbeck: Open Source Jahrbuch 2004, Berlin: Lehmanns Media. [Internet] Available from: http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/download/
jb2004/chapter_03/III-3-Robles.pdf [Accessed 21st April 2008]
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