A lot of folks have been asking about what is coming up for NG/TAW.net, and so I wanted to take some time to answer those questions. Realize though, that I can give a short term look at what is coming, the longer term goals are just taking shape! I also don’t want to back the team into a corner and promise everything, but I can talk about our development strategy and provide you with some ideas about what is happening behind the scenes.

Short Term Development:

First and foremost, I want to give you all a snapshot of the upcoming release. We are targeting this for May 24th – 25th, 2008. With an all volunteer team, we sometimes get delayed, but we are trying harder to stick to our schedule.

Issue	Type ID	Priority	Component	Summary	Assigned To
NG-DEV-56			03 - Admissions - Application	Move Applicant Messages to Private Message System	(Dawnthorn)
NG-DEV-58			01 - Communication - Rosters	Roster Recreation	(Jrsunshine)
NG-DEV-59			01 - Communication - Support	Support FAQ Release 1.0	(Icarus), (Luke)
NG-DEV-57			11 - Maintenance and Reliability - Disaster Recovery Plan	Disaster Recovery Plan Creation	(Luke)

The highlights of this release are the streamlining of the application process. We are eliminating the “on boarding process”, and also making all correspondence to the applicants go to their Private Message box along with email. This will eliminate the lost email problem. Also, it will help divisions get REC’s on the roster faster (hopefully reducing attrition during the application process). Also, making its comeback are the rosters. Jrsunshine is working really hard to get rosters that will fit within the theme of the new site, but also provide division members with better access to their dossiers. I think folks will be pleased with what we have.

Long Term Development:

In the NG group, we are always looking at least a month ahead of where we are with development. While the developers are coding, we are lining up what is the next direction for the team. Here is the basic outline of our development cycle based on a 1 month timeline. As you can see, the process repeats every cycle. While the developers are building the new systems, we are creating the next group of items for work. This way we are never idle.

 

Obviously, some cycles will be longer and some shorter. Also, there may not be visible features every release. But we will always be working to improve the system.

The Blue Sky:

So how do we know what is coming next? Well as you can see from the picture above, the CIC has a big role in defining what’s next, but we have to balance that with the long term development. In other words, it is good that we are working towards addressing the major current issues (rosters and applications are two good examples), but we can’t get caught in an endless loop of firefighting (just fixing the problem of the day). We need to balance the long term goals of the project with the immediate needs of TAW.

To do this we try to keep our work in line with the overall vision for NextGen. Remember that NG isn’t all about forums and rosters. We want to ultimately upgrade all the technology we use from user management to officer tools to event calendars. To do this the team has created something called a “Blue Sky” document. It is a wish list for the project. If we had unlimited time and resources we would produce everything in this document.

This allows us to steer the project towards this goal, while simultaneously improving the document. So as we learn more about how we want the event calendars to work, we progressively define it better. Event calendars are just one example, every feature gets explored. Then we create long term development goals that support that feature. Here is an example from the event management section.

Also here is an idea of some of the other areas we are exploring. 

What is NG Working on Next?:

When the project team began to discuss what was next for development, it became very clear that after this current release we would have to begin work on the “Meat and Bones” of the project. All of the fancy new features that we want to add rely on the member and unit management as their backbone. For example, you can’t schedule a practice for a squad if the system doesn’t know who’s on that squad!

The next release that the team works on will not be something that you all will see right away, but it will be exciting. We will begin to define how information is stored about the individual member. Also, we will begin to build the structure and logic that defines units. These two things form the backbone that the rest of the system is built on. It also gets us one step closer to replacing the Members and TFO pages with the new system.

To do this, we create a list of more detailed requirements. These are simple statements like: “I want to be able to assign a primary leader to a unit”. It may seem like a simple thing, but each of these statements help the developers to create functionality and then test it later. Each of these statements becomes the test of our system: “Can you assign a primary leader to a unit?” They code to these specific things so that we ensure we are meeting the needs of the users (all of you!).