IGSTK: Development Process and Project Management Best Practices for an Open Source Software Toolkit for Image-Guided Surgery Applications

Abstract

Open source technologies are increasing in popularity for software development. Many open source projects rely on skilled development teams whose members are distributed throughout the world. Often, agile development methods are employed by these teams, as the focus is on concurrent development and fast production over requirements management and quality assurance. The image-guided surgery toolkit (IGSTK) is an open source development project that relies on the collaboration of a skilled and distributed development team, yet addresses a domain that demands managing requirements as well as implementing a high degree of robustness and addressing safety concerns. Due to this unique cross-section of open source technology and the surgical domain, the IGSTK team has developed a set of best practices and requirements techniques to augment commonly applied agile methods. This paper presents the lessons we have learned as we have engaged in the software development process.