24 people from 6 different nations gathered in the Linux Hotel, Essen on Saturday the 16th of April to start work on the relaunch of typo3.org with participants coming from as far as Texas, USA and Iceland. The location of the hotel, on the outskirts of Essen, Germany, is an extra-ordinary relaxed environment to work in. The magnificent spring weather also has a positive influence on our work.
The Linux Hotel organisation supports the Free Software Foundation Europe and co-organizes LinuxTag in Berlin, where TYPO3 will be present as well. The rooms at the Linux Hotel are equipped with all the gear a geek can wish for and of course connectivity to the internet is there in various forms.
The first half day was mostly getting to know each other and preparing infrastructure and project management methodology. It is the first TYPO3 event for many attendees. Our goal is to have a new window to the world for TYPO3 users, decisionmakers and developers alike. It is our firm believe this will also be the start of new initiatives within the TYPO3 community.
Saturday evening was spent to create the first work packages and the project boards. The core management team created about fifty work packages during the first evening. During the days new tickets are created based on the migration of content and functionality from the current typo3.org to the new platform. At the time of writing this article the number of tickets has reached 185 and we have processed (burned) 75 of them as shown in this burndown chart. In the ideal world the green line will have to be very close to zero the coming Saturday morning.
On Saturday we also got introduced to the project management method Kanban by Eike and Sven. A lot of companies are using scrum as a method and Kanban has some similarities. We created the Kanban boards ourselves as you can see in the picture below. Basically most is done on paper without fancy software. Kanban uses different colored tickets representing priorities or length of a task. It needs no imagination to realise what a red card means. Only a certain amount of slots can be filled at one time on the board. That means that when a testing slot is full that slot first has to be cleared to enable the further flow from one phase to the other. Kanban was originally developed by Toyota as a scheduling system in their production system. It works very well in our workflow and has enabled high productivity so far.
A group of four managers take care of the overall proceedings this week. There is the extension development team, the front end team, the editorial team, the TER (extension repository) team and the solo Solr search team consisting only of the Solr specialist Ingo Renner. Each team has it's own manager. Two guys are taking care of the technical aspects concerning deployment of the website. A nice blade server (thanks to punkt.de) in the main building serves several clones of the new website. For deploying the new website we use Jenkins (formerly known as Hudson) for continuous integration. This means all the groups have there own environment and local machines for each developer and what is being developed there will be integrated into the deployment server.
While working on content migration, features and styling continued unabated at all times, a meeting like this is also an opportunity to meet face to face, create new bonds and socialise. In the mean time we are half way through the week (time-wise). It is hard to estimate where we will be on Saturday morning, but everyone is very focused and unified in the goal we have to create the new TYPO3 portal.
Thank you to all sponsors and participants for making this week possible. Special thanks to the Linux Hotel and the TYPO3 community for assisting us remotely.