Day one on the new software development project, ABLE. The plan is to create a suite of quality, low cost, enterprise level project management software - and have a lot of fun while doing it. As a contract Project Manager I'm pretty confident I know the market, as an ex-coder I'm pretty rusty and very out of date.
This blog is initially about the development of the software and the useful online resources I've used to to help me get back up to speed. Some community involvement through this blog would be excellent if you feel like chipping in.
Right, an overview:
Product Summary
In the first instance I plan to develop a thin vertical slice of end to end functionality that allows multiple Microsoft Project Plans to be loaded in to a web interface, and then display the resource utilisation over different time-frames (e.g. days, weeks, months) in a graph format. For v1 support will only be MS Project files saved as XML.
This solves the problem that most mid sized organisations do not want to purchase MS Project Server and this resource view functionality is very useful at a strategic level.
From an ABLE point of view, this implements a lot of code that can be built on for future 'vertical slices' that will extend functionality.
Technology choice
My background is MS, so I've gone for a C# ASP.NET MVC implementation. As I'm using the free Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, I've currently opted for xUnit.net for my unit testing. However, I think it will be a while before that gets implemented as I have a few more basic functionality issues to solve first...
If anyone has any comments or suggestions then I'd love to hear about them. I'm doing this as much for fun of coding as any serious attempt (yet) to make a career, so the geekier the better. I'm not keen to hear the 'there's x product that already does this' - I know there's a lot of stuff out there, but see above comment about doing this for fun ;-)
Thanks,
Jonathan
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