How about a distributed scrum project?

[Mars Tanumihardja]

I was in Toronto for the Agile 2008 conference a couple of weeks ago, and it was impressive! A huge conference with about 1500 attendees and 400 speakers! One of the cool projects happening in the DevJam area was the "Live Aid" stage where anyone could volunteer their skills in a live development project to build an e-commerce website for an organization called Mano a Mano in Bolivia. They managed the project using the Scrum methodology, so features were broken into small stories, and then broken down to even smaller tasks. And volunteers could pick up a task and complete them and check them in throughout the conference. And at the end of the week, they were able to push the site live: http://mano.codegreenlabs.com/

I think we should start a project to benefit a charity of our choosing and put our collective talents as Catholic SEs to good use. I had tried to start that with another group called the Society of Isidore (Yahoo Group), but it hasn't taken off yet -- maybe this group has more motivated individuals? In the past we had volunteered to design and create the website for the Catherine of Siena Institute: http://www.siena.org/, which is still in production.

As a possibility, I also have a C# application we use in our church for Praise and Worship and thinking of using it at mass once we get our grant approved to get new AV equipment. We can start an open source project to update (move to .NET 3.5 and WPF) and maintain the source code for that app.

Let's hear from the rest of you -- any other ideas?

Peace,
- mars -

[Allen Choong]

I think this is a good idea, so that we can contribute to the Church. However, I think we need an objective or some guidance. So that each of us will know what is he/she going to do.

[Jonathan Aquino]

I quite like the agile methodologies - Scrum, XP, etc.

[Mars Tanumihardja]

Does anyone have any experience contributing to or managing a distributed Open Source project team?

[Jonathan Aquino]

I work for Ning.com, and the team I'm on is distributed (I'm in Canada, one guy is in England, another is in Australia). The code for the project I'm working on is open source.

[Mars Tanumihardja]

Which part of Ning are you responsible for? What language/framework are you using - Java?

I wish the email notification when a reply is posted to a discussion actually contains the text of the response instead of having to link back to the site. A bigger plus would be the ability to reply via email! But I can see the desire to drive traffic back to the site (but at expense of usibilty). How long have you been with Ning? Are all the teams distributed?

Anyway, what tools would you suggest for code repository, bug tracking and project management for our group if we wanted to collaborate on an ACCP project? SourceForge for code repos; maybe the free Community Edition of Rally Dev for scrum? The choice of project would also need to factor the toolbelt that folks in this group have. Maybe we should gather a spreadsheet of skillset from members? Google doc spreadsheet?

[Jonathan Aquino]

Yeah I need to check the code to see if there is a way to include the comment text in the email notification.

The team I am on uses PHP with a home-grown MVC (Rails-like) framework. The Ning core APIs are implemented in Java.

Our ops team has set up a Subversion code repository, Jira for bug tracking, and Confluence for the wiki.

For an open-source project, I would recommend Google Code - you get a Subversion repository, a bug tracker, and a wiki. Here's one I set up: http://code.google.com/p/svn-time-lapse-view/

[Scott Fanjoy]

I am with you Mars. See my first Blog entry. I am currently maintaining and developing (PHP) a Saint Vincent de Paul site to allow the vincentians the organize, track, and maintain a database of their assistance to the less fortunate. This code could be used by many other councils throughout the world.