As you may have read, we got quite a number of applications from students wishing to contribute to Bricolage as part of Google’s Summer of Code initiative. Quite a few of them were very good. There were eight projects I wanted to accept, but, Bricolage was allocated only four projects. Of course, this is four more than we would have had otherwise, and I’m really excited to be working with them this summer.

The four winning projects are:

• Add Input Channels, by Marshall Roch
• New Sample Document types and templates, by Scott Loyd
• Port Bricolage to Apache 2/mod_perl 2 and Windows, by Sam Strasser
• Port Bricolage to MySQL, by Tamas Mezei

The other projects I wanted to get but could not were:

• Add Bulk Edit, Bulk Media Upload, and Site Tags, by Andreas Hofmeister
• Element Occurrence Specification, by Christian James Muise
• Add JSP Templating, by Adrian Fernandez
• Update and Modernize the Installer, by Yiannis Valassakis

I am hoping that some of these students might want to work on their projects, anyway. I’ve even found other developers to help with the mentoring of JSP templating (Patrick LeBoutillier with Perl/Java voodo) and the installer modernization (Sam Tregar of Matchstick fame). Unfortunately, I’ve not heard back from any of them after sending them an invite to participate in the project. C’est la vie, I guess

The hardest part of the proposal evaluation process was selecting from the 20 proposals to port Bricolage to MySQL. Ultimate, there were four excellent proposals for this project. Reading the proposals over and over, I couldn’t decide between them. Ultimately, I sent an email to the four top contenders with the following items for them to reply to:

1. Please describe in a line or two your Perl knowledge or experience (if any).
2. Please describe in a line or two your MySQL and PostgreSQL knowledge or experience (if any).
3. Please describe any previous Bricolage usage experience.
4. Please describe any previous Bricolage development experience.
5. Please describe any previous Open Source development experience.
6. What school do you attend?
7. What is your specialty at the school?
8. How many years have you attended there?
9. How much time do you expect to have for this project?
10. Have you applied for any other Summer of Code projects? If so, which ones?
11. Your personal or professional web page URL (if any).
12. Would you be willing to collaborate with another developer who might be working on a SQLite port to ensure that your changes can fully inter-operate?
13. Please outline your project plan for porting Bricolage to MySQL, including a description of what parts of the Bricolage API, DDLs, installer, and upgrader would need to be modified to complete the project.

For better or for worse, all four applicants responded with detailed answers to my questions. They were all great, and that made it even harder to select just one of them. At this point, there were only a few hours left to rank applicants in Google’s SoC Admin Web app, so I figured I had to get more objective—or at least fool myself into thinking I was.

So I decided to rank each applicant from one to five for each question, and then add up all of the results and see who came out on top. So now I was comparing answers to a single question between applicants, and filling in scores for them in a spreadsheet. As it was, things were still really close; yes, all of the students where that good! Tamas came out on top with a score of 30, two others were tied at 28, and the fourth applicant scored 26. They were close enough that I wanted to review them all one more time, this time paying specific attention to the last item in my questionnaire, the project plan.

Each of the four applicants had taken the time to read the mail lists and had looked at the existing Bricolage code. But there were varying levels of detail and demonstration of knowledge for how to implement the MySQL port, but Tamas did come out slightly ahead on this item, so I gave his proposal the green light.

But in truth, I would have been happy with any one of those four applicants. I was only sorry I had to choose only one! If Google does this again, I think I’ll list many more project ideas on the Bricolage Web site, and try to steer people to the mail lists to discuss their ideas before sending them in. Then I might end up with 11 great applications!

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I feel that it’s important to have a comprehensive approach to software development. It’s not enough to be good at coding, or testing, or writing documentation. It’s far better to excel at managing every step of the development process in order to ensure the quality and consistency of the end-to-end work as well as of the final product. I aim to do just that in my work. Here I briefly outline my methodology for achieving that aim.

First, good software development starts with good planning and research. I strive to attain a thorough understanding of what I’m developing by listening to the people to whom it matters most: the users. By gaining insight into how people in the target market think about the problem space, and by strategizing about how technology can address that space, a picture of the product takes shape. This research coalesces into a set of pragmatic requirements and goals that balance the demands of a realistic development schedule with the needs and desires of the target market.

Once the requirements have been identified, it’s time for prototyping. Task flow diagrams of user interactions model the entire system. Evaluations from the target market refine these schematics, shaping the look and feel of the final product. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of seeking market feedback to build solid and meaningful metaphors into the design. These concepts drive the user experience and make or break the success of the final product. The outcome of this feedback loop will be a UI, terminology, and object design grounded on intuitive concepts, scalable technologies, and a reliable architecture.

Next, a talented development team must be assembled and backed by a dependable, project management-oriented implementation infrastructure. Team-building is crucial for the success of any product, and in software development, a diverse set of engineers and specialists with complementary talents must come together and work as an efficient whole. As a result, I consider it extremely important to create a working culture of which team members want to be a part. Such an environment doesn’t foster a sense of entitlement, but rather of conviviality and excitement. If team members believe in what they’re doing, and they enjoy doing it, then they’re likely to do it well.

And what they’ll do is actually create the software. Each element of the product design must be broken down into its basic parts, fit into a generalizable design, and built back up into meaningful objects. I further require detailed documentation of every interface and implementation, as well as thorough unit testing. In fact, the tests are often written before the interfaces are written, ensuring that they will work as expected throughout the remainder of the development process. All aspects of the application must be implemented according to a scalable, maintainable methodology that emphasizes consistency, quality, and efficiency.

The emphasis on quality naturally continues into the quality assurance phase of the development process. The feature set is locked so that development engineers can work closely with QA engineers to test edge conditions, identify bugs, fix them, and ensure that they remain fixed. I prefer to have QA engineers punish nightly builds with suites of tests while development engineers fix the problems identified by previous days’ tests. QA is considered complete when the product passes all the tests we can dream up.

And finally, once all of the QA issues have been addressed, the final product is delivered. Naturally, the process doesn’t stop there, but starts over – in fact, it likely has already started over. New features must be schematically tested with likely users, and new interfaces designed to implement them. The idea is to end up with a solid product that can grow with the needs of the target market.

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