[Discuss] Agile software for a nacent project

[sweetser at alum.mit.edu (Doug)]

Does an agile development process make sense for projects that are all
volunteer based, with people who don't live in the same states or
countries?  In my job, we use greenhopper, part of www.atlassian.com
set of software.  There are morning scrum meetings, story sessions,
sprint planning and sprint completions.  That makes sense when
everyone drives to the same building.  For a volunteer based project,
those regular meetings are not going to be held.

I can imagine a planning board being of use.  "Look, here,
specifically is what we want done next."  That could be overkill
however, with say a newsgroup, twiki and github being sufficient.

If you do think some aspects of the agile process make sense, what
software would you use?  I could pony up $20/month and use atlassian's
hosted service.  I don't think I will have 10 people who want to code
in a year, but one never knows.  If it does take off, then the costs
jump.

The project of course involves quaternions, thinking about making
animation software using the multimedia Java platform known as
processing (http://processing.org/) for web sites and android phones.

Doug