I have just finished the first revision of the "HEMP Best (and Worst)
Practices" book, and an updated revision of the "HEMP light" book. I
appreciate the feedback I've received (especially from Ruth Hoffman)
on the HEMP light book that has lead to improvements in this revision.
I call these "books" but they are really short documents, about 20
pages each, and should be easily digestible in about an hour each.
These books contain the concepts that I plan to use to drive the
Universal Business Process Library (UBPL) effort, and the various
efforts that have been discussed that can be based on it. The most
important aspect of this, to me anyway, is to start doing more
collaboration on requirements and designs in addition to the current
successful collaboration on implementation.
Along with being helpful for this part of the OFBiz effort, the HEMP
books are primarily meant to be guidelines for service providers or
end-user internal groups, and are designed to work especially well
with something that is readily customizable like Apache OFBiz. I've
been using some of these things for a LONG time, others I only started
using within the last couple of years, and all of them have been
extremely helpful to better meet end-user expectations and create
systems that are a good match for the organizations that use them. Now
that my little plug is out of the way... ;)
The HEMP books are available here:
http://www.dejc.com/home/HEMP.html
The OFBiz UBPL Index is here:
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBREQDES/Universal+Business+Process+Library+Index
Now that these two HEMP books are done (or "initially complete") I'm
planning to work more on the UBPL stories, and then on overlap/gap
analysis, screen outlines and other design artifacts that are based on
them to document how many things are currently done in OFBiz, and also
start driving some new specialpurpose applications that more directly
address some of the business processes documented in UBPL.
For anyone that would like to get involved, I would more than
appreciate the help! The one thing that I would ask is that you read
the 2 HEMP books, the UBPL Introduction document, and the existing
UBPL stories. The overall time for doing that should be around 4
hours. I know that is a bit to ask, but doing so should get you to a
point where you have a good idea about where this is going, what has
been done, and what still needs to be (and can be!) done.
-David
