Collaborative Development Environments

Track: 
Business and Strategy
Experience: 
Intermediate

Building a strong collaborative development environment is a challenge faced by most organizations that produce web sites (even if they don't acknowledge the need). Working with Drupal introduces some unique issues and opportunities for groups looking to build internal processes, which can be extended through the use of additional open source tools.

This session focuses on how to build effective collaboration processes and systems using open source software, which can be tailored to the needs of an organization with minimal effort. To illustrate various points,this session will use examples form the ICT infrastructure in place at Trellon, which enables a development team spanning 5 continents and 9 time zones to collaborate effectively. It will highlight some of the issues organizations have to deal with in order to keep people productive and predictably deliver quality products.

More specifically, we are going to discuss the following:

  • Project Management: Systems in place for tracking deliverables, deadlines and terms of engagements.
  • Knowledge Management: Systems in place for collecting knowledge about projects, processes and practices with an eye to building transparency and keeping key stakeholders involved throughout an engagement.
  • Code Versioning and Automated Testing: Systems in place for storing code revisions, verifying code conforms to standards in the Drupal community, and performing automated functional and unit testing.
  • Hardware Monitoring and Reporting: Systems in place for managing hardware, monitoring servers and issuing alerts.
  • Channel Monitoring: Systems in place for tracking communications in various channels and storing a history of communications between staff and clients.
  • Training: Systems in place for training clients and collecting feedback in support of agile development processes.
Intended audience: 

Managers of development teams, looking to improve their own collaborative development environment. Developers looking to accomplish strategic tasks, such as automated testing and code review, better requirements gathering, better collaboration with geographically-distant peers.

Questions answered by this session
Question 1: 
What is an ICT and how does strategic planning around it improve my ability to produce web sites?
Question 2: 
What kinds of open source tools can be used to improve my Drupal development practices?
Question 3: 
How can Drush be used to automate the setup of projects in systems other than Drupal?
Question 4: 
How can training be used effectively within agile development processes to eliminate stakeholder bias?
Question 5: 
What kinds of open source monitoring agents can be used to proactively detect defects with products and systems?
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