On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 2:34 AM, Krabina Bernhard <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi John, > > I suppose with turnkey solutions you mean individually programmed solutions? > > In my opinion the main benefit of SMW is implementation time. > I can offer our clients sophisticated web database solutions, calculating in days, not weeks (or even months)!
Certainly. Now, allow me to describe a few requirements for such a system, and you tell me how you would accomplish it using SMW: I need a number of different document types. * Tasks * User Stories * Epics * Themes * Projects * Iterations * Releases * Release Notes * Teams * Backlogs * Coding Standards * Test Plans * Test Cases * Test Suites * Issues * Individual Scrum Updates * Team Scrum Updates * Scrum Of Scrums Updates Each document should have a page name that is not dependent on its contents. So, for example, if you have a defect, you should be able to change the summary of the defect without effecting the page name. This means that the page name should not be a string, it should be a number. But of course, you have over a dozen different document types, so it can't JUST be a number, you need some kind of prefix. Now, because the page name doesn't include anything human readable, you can't just do basic queries, you need queries that actually extract meaningful elements out of the pages. But in order to display something other than raw data, you can't just select properties, you need to create a template to go with it. With so many record types, and with needing to display so many small pieces of data here, there, and everywhere, you are going to have hundreds of templates that all they do is manipulate the data format. Something that the query itself should be able to do. Oh, and did I mention that you can't use these templates to display data in tables or it breaks the Further Results... functionality? For the most part, the system should allow any of those items to be related to any other of those items, as the user sees fit. Those relationships should be navigable via a tree. Those relationships should be manageable in the most efficient user interface possible, preferably by dragging and dropping to/from the tree. How would you do that with SMW? If you can't do drag-and-drop, what kind of user interface would you design to facilitate document relationships? Now, I would love to see SMW become the best thing since sliced bread. But I know it is not, currently. SalesForce.com can build a web database application in minutes what takes days to build in SMW. An experienced Rails developer can build more feature-rich applications in less time than it takes to build an equivalent in SMW. The one thing that SMW has that these others don't is the integrated wiki. That, by itself, will not be enough. In order to become a serious competitor, it is going to have to become orders of magnitude faster and easier to develop applications in than it already is. Yes, it's pretty fast as-is, now. But I've got a guy who needs to be able to expand it, and he can't wrap his brain around it. I'm one of the best I know, and I struggle to make things work because of all the quirks in the system. And read through these lists and count how many times the answer to a question is "you can't do that." Those are all signs that something has to be changed for the better if SMW is ever to become a viable enterprise-level alternative, and not just a really nifty toy. So that takes us back to Yaron's comment: there needs to be funding! If we could have one Scrum team working on this for a year, we could likely go from zero to enterprise-grade. But we aren't going to get there based only on volunteer contributions working without standards, working only on the parts they personally are most interested in. So, if we seriously want to accomplish what is written in the FAQ, we need to start some kind of foundation, and start soliciting donations to it. -- John Arrowwood John (at) Irie (dash) Inc (dot) com John (at) Arrowwood Photography (dot) com John (at) Hanlons Razor (dot) com -- http://www.irie-inc.com/ http://arrowwood.blogspot.com/
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