Skunkworks

Is so funny how Gmail goes directly from Beta to 2.0 .

Read today something very interesting related to the office format wars. As it appears Sun does not care too much if ODF is going to be the winner of the format wars. The Open Document Foundation is talking now about a new format called CDF which has better chances to be inter operable with the Microsoft format. Do not know which of the 3 formats is better from technical point of view, but it seems that ODF (the format) is loosing traction.

Also another thing that I heard recently (a podcast from The Register) was the discontent that Mark Shuttleworth has regarding the OpenOffice as a whole. He is not happy that it take 9 hours to compile the source code (for that matter I think nobody is happy about it) and he says that if the guys at openoffice.org do not move the software in the right direction he (Ubuntu guys) will take matter in his own (their) hands.

Probably is the time for some sort of rewrite of the suite. The big problem is who is going to pay for this. I wonder if IBM will somehow take over from Sun and develop Lotus Symphony into the new open source office suite. And also I wonder if Mark is thinking to switch Ubuntu to Lotus Symphony or something based on it.

Read today at MacRumors that Apple sold 2 million copies of Leopard in the first weekend. At 129$ per license they got 260 millions. At 85$ per hour programmer cost they can afford let’s say 3.000.000 programmer hours for the money they got in the first weekend. This will translate in 375.000 programmer days. Assuming that the development took 3 years this means that the money they got in the first weekend allowed Apple to pay for around 500 developers during that time. I know that the numbers are not very precise and I know there are other costs beside development but I still think the magnitude order is ok.

One of the biggest problems that appear during development of a piece of software is getting the requirements right. If you do a mistake at this early stage you will have big problems down the road. I found a site where you can develop prototypes and creating requirements whilst getting feedback from your customers and engaging them in the business requirements development process. The best thing on the site is that it allows the stakeholder to create the requirements himself if he chooses to. You should really take your time and take a look at the videos on that site. It is amazing how easy it seems to develop full working prototypes and in the same creating a full business requirements document (use cases and nonfunctional requirements included). I do not know how the guys from Simunication dit it but I really like their product. Most probably if I would have to manage a software project again I would pay the 129$ per month which is their most expensive plan.

Another problem that needs to be taken care of during development is creating and maintaining the project plan. The best web based project management software that I found is www.devshop.com . I really like the way you can control the software development using this site. Again take your time and watch the screencasts. I am not sure if there is a non manual way to transfer the requirements from Simunication to Devshop but I think this would be a minor annoyance anyway. The Devshop guys charge 24$ per month per user which is ok if you are going to create accounts for your project managers and team leaders only.

Add to this a secure subversion hosting service for 10-20$ per month and Skype based communication for every member of your team, and I am pretty sure the location of your programmers does not matter anymore.

PS The post above is not a payed post .