mamoo project

Here's an application that might actually be useful. It's called mamoo project - http://mamooproject.appspot.com/. I've got more work to do on it, but there's enough here to look at. Here's how this all came about. At work, we've been going through a review process of requirements gathering tools. I'm not sure if we'll purchase one, but the vendors are sure nice to talk to. All of the presentations we've seen start off with something like, "Imagine the hell of having to capture requirements in a ginormous Word document. How stupid is that? (giggle...giggle)" However correct they may be, this is not a good way to win over a group of people, especially when everyone in the room has a "ginormous" requirements document back at their desk waiting for them.

So the outcome of all of this? We're still living with our big Word requirements document and we're dragging our feet with the vendors. The fact is, all of the tools we've looked at are good and have pretty much the same functionality and integration points with other applications, our test suite, etc. There are some big differences in cost, but that isn't the issue. I think the biggest barrier for us is maybe a little bit of fear. These are big applications. These things will collect requirements, create use cases, build activity diagrams, create test scenarios and scripts, integrate with development tools, build mockups. It's a bit much for an organization that doesn't have a standard template for the ginormous requirements document. We should probably start smaller. So I began working on mamoo project.

First off, I do not expect mamoo project to be used at work. I'm working on google app engine and work would not buy in to using something on gae. I could port it to .Net if they wanted to use it, but I don't really have the time. I just took advantage of this problem so that I could work on google. This looked like a good problem to solve and if I use it for future projects so much the better.

I started off with just the requirements piece. Here's what we have.

- You can look at the requirements for mamoo project to see what's complete "accepted" and what is left "review".
- On the requirements screen use the bottom left control to display all versions and all minor requirements.
- When you first go to requirements you only see the minor ones.
- All changes to requirements are saved as new versions of the same requirement.
- Requirements are color coded based on status.
- The layouts were a little tricky, but they do work under IE, FF, and Safari, even on the iPod if you squint real hard.
- All of the asynchronous calls are taken care of with SimpleAsynch.

There is a large list of fixes and features to be added. I'm working now on a site landing page. This will include security and access lists for all projects. I'm also working on the export of the requirements to google docs. It's a little tricky. You can't just create a new spreadsheet in docs, you have to use an existing one or upload a new one. The problem is that google app engine won't let you just load up a new sheet from the file system. I'll figure it out. The risks and tasks and reports are all just an idea. Along with the challenge of capturing requirements, projects need a good way to manage risk. In the past I've used several tools for this, none have been ideal though one came close, Mercury Test Director - Quality Center - HP QC. The defect section had a nice layout and the defects themselves were customizable. It gave us a good place to store risks, issues, action items, requirements defects, test defects, lessons learned, anything you can thing of. You had good traceability and an okay reporting tool. I'll model the mamoo project tasks and risks section off of Quality Center. It will have much less functionality, but it will still be useful and it won't require a massive applet download to run. Risks and Tasks will also be exportable to docs.

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