This Wednesday I did a short presentation at the Houston Technology Center’s “Starting a Web-Based Business” lunch series. My presentation was on “Open Source Tools for Software Development”, and I highlighted several tools that my development team uses regularly.
I’ll post that presentation shortly, but here I just wanted to jot down a few notes from reactions to the presentation – feedback I got after the talk.
- One manager, owner of a well-established software firm here in Houston, liked the idea of wikis for organizing his team; but he’s still looking for a better project management tool, something “larger” than Poi, the issue-tracker I demonstrated. Something that could track milestones, and keep the team on track.
Yes, I’d like to see better tools for PM too. Traditionally, we’ve used MS Project. Problem is, it’s not easy to share – at Interliant, we tried the Lotus Notes-based Project Gateway, but ultimately found it awkward to use. Basecamp, an online service, looks attractive – not sure yet how well it scales, and compels your team to use it.
One thing we do, though, when a project gets hot and heavy, is that we fix the milestone dates at regular intervals: once a week or once every two weeks there’s going to be a build. That stays fixed; what adjusts, though, are which features that make it into the build. Our only rule is that the feature must be a tangible end-user benefit – we can’t “deliver” just background architecture or design in the next release, and expect that to be considered progress by our client. Managing at this point becomes simpler, as the project schedule just shows a set of period milestones; ts in the status meetings we discuss which features will make it into the next build – the customer, of course, sets priorities, and there’s some give-and-take on features that may slip because of their complexity, or unexpected problems.
Still need a tool, though, to capture and display these milestones and feature deliverables! Must search more …
- One manager of IT at the Houston Chronicle mentioned they use Capistrano for deployment, instead of Ant. It’s Ruby-based, but you can use it for automating all sorts of things. It looks very promising, so I’ll have to check it out. Ant is cool, is built into Eclipse, and does the job, but it’s XML. Rather a yicky way to write out deployment scripts!
- Another fellow approached me after the talk and said his friend is involved in a large-scale application that uses, of all things, Smalltalk! It does heuristics, and I think it was oil field-related. I’m hoping I’ll get to meet this guy, and learn more. I still love Smalltalk … just can’t find any projects where it’s a winner here in town 🙁
