As I mentioned in the email below I've been working on the lightweight
version of this analysis and design process, the one I propose to use
for the UBPL effort.
It is now available here (link at the bottom of the page):
http://www.dejc.com/home/HEMP.html
Comments and feedback are welcome on this! I imagine this "HEMP light"
document and the ones that follow will go through a goodly number of
revisions. :)
-David
On Jun 11, 2009, at 4:03 AM, David E Jones wrote:
The last major priority that I pushed on was clean ups and
enhancements to the framework. While there are still some big
improvements coming along (new authorization approach and more AJAX/
etc stuff come to mind), I think we've made huge progress on that
and the framework is significantly cleaner and far more helpful when
writing business applications.
I've mentioned this a little bit and started putting some seed
material together, and the next high level priority that I'd like to
work on (and work with others on!) is to add collaboration on
requirements and designs to our existing excellent collaboration on
implementation.
What I mean by that is instead of collaborating mostly through the
code and lower level artifacts I'd like to work with others on
higher level artifacts including requirements (organized by process
from an end-user organization perspective) and designs based on
those requirements, and then use those designs to improve OFBiz. The
most important improvement that should result from this is that we
have applications that are designed to support various business
activities and that better meet the needs of various types of end-
users. These may be improvements to the existing base
"applications", and many will work best as "specialpurpose"
applications that are based on the base applications and that more
directly address the needs of certain users.
There are some exciting possibilities for this. One of them that
seems interesting to lots of people right now is to create an
application that OFBiz itself will use. Once that happens we can
make sure it works well for other open source projects (both in and
out of the ASF) and make using it a no-brainer choice that will not
only help the world of open source in general, but also be perhaps
the best form of marketing that OFBiz could ask for as an open
source project with no real marketing budget.
There are many other types of organizations we could target, and
what I've started working on to help us collaborate on requirements
acknowledges this. Some of these organization types will share
business activities and can share requirements, designs, and
implementations. Others will have some pretty unique requirements.
For example there are many things that an open source project does
that service providers also do (such as manage tasks and issues),
but also many things that each does that the other does not (open
source projects don't typically invoice for work done, collect
against receivables, etc).
One other important aspect of this is documentation. A few people
have written on the mailing lists and to me personally about this
recently. My opinion is that this collaboration on requirements will
be the single most important effort to prepare for a successful
documentation effort. The requirements themselves (and overlap
information with OOTB apps and links to designs that are
implemented) have some value as implicit documentation, and more
importantly provide a foundation and structure that is consistent
with what end-users are looking for and will help organize a large
volume of information. IMO that is one of the biggest problems with
documentation efforts to date: it is not consistently organized, and
it is very tough in general to organize it.
Anyway, here is the main page for what I'm calling the "Universal
Business Process Library":
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBREQDES/Universal+Business+Process+Library+Index
The name is based on the concept of the "Universal Data Model" that
we got from "The Data Model Resource Book, Revised Edition, Volumes
1 and 2" (and the new Volume 3 is pretty interesting too). The trick
is that there doesn't seem to be such a thing in existence, at least
not in a form that is useful to OFBiz. There are lots of standards
and other efforts that have some great seed material for this, like
the UBL and OAGIS standards which document information flow between
organizations at many different points during business processes,
but have a focus on what is external to an organization instead of
one that is internal, which is much of what OFBiz provides.
For those who want to get involved, there is a quick introduction to
UBPL here:
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBREQDES/UBPL+Introduction
To help people get a quick understanding of the artifacts
(documents) and process I have in mind for doing these requirements,
overlap analysis, designs, etc I'm working on a shorter version of
the "HEMP" book that I've slowly been assembling for the last few
years (and more formally in the last 1.5 years). I'll send out
information on that ASAP.
The most mature high level story for a particular type of
organization is the "Story of Online Retail Company" which you can
find here:
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBREQDES/Story+of+Online+Retail+Company
That high level story has links to the more detailed stories, many
of which can be shared with other types of organizations and so they
are organized separately under the "General Business Process
Stories" section of the UBPL Index page.
===============================
Sorry for the long email! I know I've also written something similar
to this before, and there is a reason I'm writing about it again!
I'll be presenting about this at OSCON in July, and probably also at
ApacheCon in November, but there is another reason.
Another benefit to this pattern is that if used for projects that
involve customization of OFBiz it will significantly increase
chances of success in terms of overall efficiency and also effective
applicability to the end-user organization.
Helping others do just that is what I have chosen for the next step
of my career. To pursue that direction I have recently resigned from
Hotwax Media and returned to being an Independent Consultant. My
hope is that by doing this I can work with more of you and do so in
a way that best meets your needs. For more information see my recent
blog post on the topic (at http://osofbiz.blogspot.com/) and my new
web site (at http://www.dejc.com/).
My vision for the future is to solve the biggest problem that OFBiz
has right now (applicability to end-user organizations) and the
biggest problem most service providers have (successfully tailoring
OFBiz to the needs of their clients)... which also happens to be the
biggest opportunity for service providers too.
I look forward to collaborating a lot more with a lot more of you!
-David
