In the interest of trying to help define a project and requirements for an openly accessible tool (or tools) for ARC case management, I'm asking the various communities to offer ideas and identify a starting point for tracking the requirements and defining project scope.
Firstly, I'm wondering what method we should use to track the requirements. Is there some document style or approach used internally? Should I just get a page started on genunix.org and we'll just edit that ad-hoc?
Secondly, I _know_ there needs to be some decisions made at some point about using a VCS to track the cases. Is this necessary? Would we need to be able to handle openly exposed cases and closed cases? Would they need to be hosted on different repositories? What are the reasons we're inclined to want to version the cases? I know when I mentioned it some time ago, my thinking was that with an externally accessible hg repo, I: a) had the tools necessary to manage the materials myself, and b) had protection in case I screwed it up. Is there a VCS underlying the case system now? Who are the stakeholders and decision makers with this? I ask this now because I anticipate this will require quite a bit of internal discussion.
Minor detail -- if we have multiple repositories hosting the materials, we'll need some mechanism to generate unique case id's. Presumably, that's something that could be hosted on the OSo infrastructure and shared for all case repositories (open and closed).
As for scoping, how much should we consider the entire lifecycle of project work? John Plocher's prototype application seemed like it would track the workflow of at least the entire case lifecycle. Or possibly even the project from inception to delivery (presumably through integration with OpenRTI and other tools). Did I misinterpret that? Would internal teams use such a tool or set of tools?
Maybe even more important questions for all of this is: can this work be done by external contribution or would this need to be staffed with internal resources? Do we need to have a project defined before we can get this officially started? I'm tempted to "just go do it" based on what I know but I can just sense so much agreement and decision making (i.e. politicking) will need to occur internally that I figured I'll try the official route first. Hence this initial set of inquiries.
I'm reaching out to the website team as I know some of this might impact what they're doing. I don't know why I haven't seen any materials or plans about what they're planning long term, but I presume as part of this website stabilization effort that is underway, follow on improvement work is being planned on the site overall. I do know there's a wiki replacement sometime in our future. Possibly. Are there dependencies or overlaps on the OpenRTI and (defects|bugs) tools?
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