"Exceeding the expectations"

Open Source is a well-known and now established
mean of software development. Communities of contributors
producing results used world wide (Apache, Debian, Ubuntu, Python..)
through effective distributed infrastructure - nothing new here.

Agile Software Development and the various methods and practices
under the Agile umbrella (XP, Scrum, Lean, Crystal, DSDM..) have
been making a splash within software development since the last
8-10 years - nothing new here either.

EU funds R/D through large scale framework programs targeting changes in various different domains, among them IT. This has been the
main practice for the European Union in order to support and facilitate
increased competitiveness for European organisations and companies - nothing
new here either.

But what if you have a project that combines these elements? That
mixes Open Source, with Agile practices - empowered through
EU-funding? Mixing cultures - distributed work styles, informal,
transparent and voluntary work cultures with formal contractual
requirements regarding milestones and deliverables? Is it doable, is
it feasible, is it sustainable, will it achieve success?

In this talk we will tell the tale of PyPy, a project from the Python
community that went for EU-funding and received it, and how this
affected the team and the community behind the effort. We will focus on
sharing our experiences of sprint-driven development, the hybrid model
for making agile work in a distributed and open source context, and
how we where able to do this within a formal contractual framework.

So if you are interested in challenges and solutions for how to design
a development process that successfully combines many elements of Open
Source, Agile, distributed development and/or EU-funding then this
talk will provide food for thoughts and hopefully inspiration as well.

And - by the way, the title of the talk is the response from the
EU-reviewers at the end of the funded part of the project, saying that
the project had reached "excellent technical results, exceeding the
expectations". The project and community survived the EU-funding and
have continued to achieve results being non-funded. So, the practices
we are sharing in this talk were critical success factors for us - maybe
they can be useful for you as well?

Please visit www.pypy.org to read about the project if you are
interested in understanding the context of the talk. Also note that
although PyPy is about creating a language agnostic JIT generator and
that is awesome and cool, that is not what this talk is about. It is
about how we worked/and are working in order to achieve those results.

[there's likely going to be a co-presenter, that's why the "we" :)]
[unfortunately no co-presenter :(]