It suddenly struck me today that I have never developed any large application or

Question

It suddenly struck me today that I have never developed any large application or worked with a team of programmers, and so am missing out a lot - both in terms of technical knowledge and the social-fun part of it. And I would like to rectify that - an idea is to start an open source group by training college students (for no charge) and developing some open source application with them.

Please give me some basic advice on the whole process of how to (1) plan and (2) manage projects in a team. What new skill sets would you recommend?

(I have read joel on software and 37 Signals, and got many insightful tips from them. But I'd like a little more technical knowledge ...)

Background (freelancer, past 4+ years) - Computer engineer > graphic / web designer > online marketing > moved on to programming in PHP, Perl, Python > did Oracle DBA OCP training to understand DB's > current self-assigned title - web application developer.

Explanation / Answer

First things first - there is no technology solution that will solve this problem. There are plenty of tools that will help, but in the end, this is a soft-skills project that you're working on yourself.

Steve McConnell's book "Code Complete" is probably the best resource of the last 20 years on the subject of managing software development. With that, managing a development project in the professional world, versus an OSS project done on a volunteer basis will require somewhat different skillsets.

Do you have an idea of what the project will be? How many people will be involved? What their skillsets are?

Let's assume you have answers to all of those. Break the project down to its' component parts, figure out what the absolute bare minimum is to get a first release going. Assign components. Set them loose.

Your challenge? Keeping everyone communicating, motivated, and happy.

Plenty of other people here can contribute thoughts as to tools that work well in a collaborative environment. A few to start with:

Git or another source-code control system is a must.
A wiki, or Google Docs, or some other collaborative editing environment.
Bug/task tracing. I like trac, there are plenty of others.
You're dealing with volunteers, and college students. People may flake. People may lose interest. Keeping people interested, and motivated will be a big challenge, since other priorities (jobs, classes, friends, dating) will interfere.

Thoughts from others as to their experiences as to what managers/coordinators did to keep them motivated on volunteer projects will definitely help.

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