Anybody can start a new project in AgileVentures, however we STRONGLY RECOMMEND that anyone starting a project complete at least three features for existing AgileVentures projects in order to experience AgileVentures' project workflow. We are strongly committed to agile methodologies, open source and open development, and we focus on charity and non-profit projects because the majority of work done in AgileVentures comes from volunteers. We can consider projects from for-profit enterprises, but we will require a strong committment to open source and open development.
If you want to start a new project please talk to us about it in the new projects channel. If you feel that you are ready to go, a first step would be to invite the community to an Inception Meeting where you pitch the project idea to your audience with the goal to attract developers and form a team. You also need to create a project page on the AgileVentures site itself by going to http://www.agileventures.org/projects/new.
Associate membership is not required to start a project, but will get you priority support on your project and on completing features for other projects.
We will also help you to set up a dedicated Slack channel for your project. See some of the existing active project channels for examples of project activity:
The slack channels are used to discuss the project in general, for members to get help with technical issues and also to vote on estimating how difficult it will be to complete those stories. Depending on the project, team members may coordinate their activities and vote on stories in real time in online planning meetings or project specific "stand-ups".
Every team has the freedom to run their project according to their own principles, but we strongly encourage having a "real" customer - often a non-technical Product Owner. We promote many of the techniques that are associated with Agile and XP such as BDD, TDD, estimating story complexity, tracking a backlog of features, pair programming, code review, continous integration and continuous deployment.
Please be aware that we require projects to follow an agile methodology as outlined here.
You can see some examples of the workflow of other projects in some of the CONTRIBUTING.md documents:
Some projects use Pivotal Tracker to manage their backlog of stories, while others use GitHub Projects, Trello, or Jira. If you have any questions whatsoever please don't hesitate to ask in our ProjectSupport channel on Slack. If at any point you find you are waiting too long for an answer, feel free to tag @thomaso in that channel to get additional attention :-)