Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene at ONLamp.com - What Corporate Projects Should Learn from Open Source:

"It is rare to find a corporate environment where the project team has anything approaching the level of planning, documentation, or review found in successful open source projects. For some reason, as soon as a budget and a deadline are involved, all of the lessons we've learned over the years and applied successfully to open source projects seem to fly out the window.

[...] However, it's well known that corporate projects routinely fail to produce quality software. or even any results at all! Many important studies have repeatedly reported that fact, such as the Standish Group's annual CHAOS Report (which as recently as 2004 has shown that less than one-third of corporate projects are considered successful).

[...] These principles, if adhered to, will help lead to success on any project, open source or proprietary. These principles are:

• * Tell the truth all the time
• * Trust the team
• * Review everything, test everything
• * All developers are created equal
• * The fastest way through the project is to do it right

Each of these principles is important, and each of them is routinely ignored in corporate environments--to the detriment of project success."