Development Process

Background

uPortal is a JA-SIG sponsored open-source enterprise portal framework developed by higher education for higher education. It it currently in its 2nd generation, with a 3rd generation in a development sandbox. The project has enjoyed considerable success and is widely deployed (600+ production deployments). To ensure future success and sustainable development we are seeking to formalize our existing community processes and roles, and encourage greater transparency and wider contribution.

Goals

We wish to take advantage of the open-source model to marshal resources from a variety of contributors. As opposed to traditional processes which prioritize the allocation of a fixed pool of resources, an open-source community's available resources scale with the size and depth of the community.

We encourage a bottom-up approach to scheduling and prioritizing, focusing community resources and collaboration. Natural prioritization ensures the framework advances as members allocate resources (developer time, paid consulting, local expertise, or others) to address local needs. This has the advantage of members prioritizing work according to local needs, aligning community resources with the needs of our individual members. We seek to provide a focus for planning, coordinating, resource gathering, and tracking this progress. We encourage:

Open Planning - Gather requirements and use an open process to advance the uPortal framework
Sharing the load - enable collaboration, resource sharing and expertise transfer for planning and implementing requirements
Preventing local forks - ease contributing local modifications/enhancements into the base uPortal framework
Harness the community - Involve large & small institutions, vendors, and individuals

Deliverables

Vision

A living document capturing institutional and individual visions for an enterprise portal framework by educational institutions for educational institutions. Address problems we want to solve and descriptions of roles we see portals playing e.g customizable, personalizable user platform, service delivery mechanism

Features

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Development Roadmaps

Development plans are expressed in 6 month roadmaps solidified at the semi-annual developer meetings detailing:

planned features and scope for the next 6 months
task assignments & resource requests
longer term development goals

Initial Milestones & Status

Plan for initial ramp up of portal framework requirements library and incorportion into development cycle

Target Dates	Task	Status
Feb 06	Start with seed of core institutions and players Rutgers, UW, VT, Yale, Texas Tech, Unicon, SCT, ESUP Portail, JA-SIG UK, Nagoya	in progress
March 06	Seed library with lists
Spring Dev Meeting	Follow up at uP developers meeting initial vision statement collection collection of core institution contributed requirements initial roadmap documenting developer meeting plans and commitments
May 06	Put out for community review before JA-SIG conference refined initial vision statement collection organized & filtered core institution contributed requirements
Summer uPortal Conference	Solicit contributions and feedback at JA-SIG 2006 Summer Conference Keynote mention Moderated discussion session Gather feedback and items from BOF sessions
July 06	incorporate conference contributions and feedback vision statement collection incorporating conference contributions requirements library incorportaing conference contributions
Fall Dev Meeting	use to build roadmap at Fall developers meeting
Winter JA-SIG Conference	Update requirements library and gather information on community priorities and needs/requests

Ongoing Milestones

Spring Developers Meeting	Review roadmap progress, update roadmap detailing next 6 months from requirements library
Summer Conference	Update requirements library and gather information on community priorities and needs/requests
Fall Developers Meeting	Review roadmap progress, update roadmap detailing next 6 months from requirements library
Winter Conference	Update requirements library and gather information on community priorities and needs/requests

wash, rinse, repeat...

Roles

Framework Coordinator

The Framework Coordinator gathers our vision and requirements for a portal framework to build a strategy for the future. He is also responsible for leading the translation of our strategy into a development roadmap and coordinating follow up and action items between development meetings and conferences.

Point of contact for collaboration, filters (or delegates) suggestions and comments
Coordinate activity (email lists, schedule conference calls, follow up on action items/deliverables)
Key player in the roadmap planning process, especially pre-developer meeting groundwork
Work with branch leads to incorporate roadmap items into specific release schedules
Moderate discussions, maintain agendas, track progress

Release Engineer

Incorporate road map items into branch-specific release schedules consistent with the Release Strategy
Coordinate development efforts related to implementing features/changes within a particular development line

Core Developers

Informal group of experts and leaders. Possible responsibilies include:

coordinate/maintain requirements and plans for a specific functional area
contribute expertise, advice, and code
represent significant stakeholders.

Community Contributors

Community members expressing their wants and needs for a portal framework

Outline vision, requirements, and use cases
Provide resources (developer time, money, expertise)