No doubt the team did its share of research for this project, but it looks like there's a crucial gap in their understanding of the problem domain. I can just see their faces when they finally realize that their AI, with all its understanding of questions, is completely baffled when presented only with answers!

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You've got to be kidding me!

You would never have even HEARD of MySQL if it had not been an open source product. You think the closed source world had room for yet another database? I'd like to point out that even with just Oracle and IBM in there, that space was pretty crowded, and there were plenty of small players too, going for the crumbs.

MySQL, when it started gaining mind share and usership, was a buggy, feature poor product with nothing going for it EXCEPT its open source status and developer community. If it were closed source, you would never have heard of Michael Widenius nor MySQL. He would either have abandoned his project long ago or still be toiling in obscurity on this little hobby DB in his spare time while he paid the bills with a real job.

Open sourcing a product does mean losing some degree of control, but for all that, it's an excellent way to launch a company into the lime light. As we've seen over and over, there are plenty of ways to leverage that into wealth, with control or without.

I agree with the parent. In your case, while you are taking on a bigger project, you are not being called upon to manage multiple resources, multiple dependencies etc. That's a large part of what project management is. It sounds like you're more after something that can act as a guide to software development. A nice, short, practical book is "UML Distilled" by Martin Fowler. While it is geared towards teaching the application of UML, it does so by describing it's various diagrams in context and showing how to use them yourself.

The book starts out with a description of the software development process advocated by Fowler, which is an iterative approach. My favorite nugget is in a section headed "When to Use Iterative Development" which begins, "You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed." :)

There's a breakdown of the project phases and the book deals with requirements, risk management, planning and lots of other issues, and at the end there's a nice simple example.

If you already feel like your project is in a bit of trouble, time may be of the essence. At just 166 pages, "UML Distilled" is a quick read and takes a very pragmatic approach that should get you going in the right direction quickly.