Dear Chris, I sent a brief summary to Patrick directly. If you send me your
email in an unspammable format, I'd be happy to forward what I wrote to you.
It's the kind of project I'd be interested in were I still in the UK. From
experience of working on a very successful rapid project to develop a
government budget system, I would recommend:
- set up very good communications between the business experts and the techies
and have an affable but firm, hands-on project manager who makes sure these
communications never falter
- automate EVERYTHING about the data model and testing so that you can iterate
it quickly. Unit tests, Web tests, cruise control, automated build, etc.
- get your two main techies to wrap the data model with a primitive UI and
hammer the f* out of it with repeated client interactions, going through all
use cases and scenarios again and again. Do not waste time building fancy
screens or peripheral functionality until you have the data model really clear.
- also prioritize all non-UI data flows into/out of the system (ex. data
imports, spreadsheet exports) and get the whole data flow-through working as
soon as possible
I think OFBiz would /help/ with all of these bits but the project mgt and
senior techies and at least one positively-mind business expert will be the key.
I actually know a really excellent guy now based in London who'd be a cracking
senior tech for this kind of project, however last we spoke he was fed up of
Java after all these years and is doing RoR. But his firm might do consulting
work, I will check with him and if there is any interest, I will put you in
touch with each other.
If I could help in a remote way, it would be to persuade you to use ZK for the
front-end, and help you get it set up. But in any case, I am long overdue to
fulfill my promise to write a tutorial about that on the OFBiz wiki. Nearly at
top of my to-do list, honest.
cameron
P.S. congratulations David! Do NOT take a laptop anywhere near your honeymoon
mate!
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