Project BHAL - A new Beginning
I´ve decided that project WOM has reached a mature state that allows project BHAL to begin it´s true intent: A website that allows you to develop workflows in Windows Workflow Foundation and then assign the created workflows to projects and/or customers.
Let´s take a simple example. Let´s say that Customer A tells you to do the project in a more agile way because "we wants it", please deliver "our precious". Customer B, on the other hand, already works with dev shops and even offshore development, so they must use a more formal process and then they want a lot of hardly used documentation (aka CMMI).
At this point you then have a few options:
- Customer A and B are really kind and want to pay a lot of money for your work, so just assemble separate teams for each of their projects and let them pay for it. Then train each team to do as the customer asks.
- Train your developers on both approaches, ask them to be really careful on the approach for each customer, and HOPE FOR THE BEST.
- Or you can have a tool that instructs your developers and project managers on what to do next as specified by you and the customers. You would do this in the form of a workflow of steps needed for each customer and deliverables to be achieved on each step. Your developers would then be "orchestrated" and the cost of having different development processes would be really decreased.
As you can see I tend to think that whatever you can automate and whenever you can make machines work for humans, by all means do it!
This is what Bhal is about. Enabling dev shops to be able to use Team Foundation Server not only as a Source Control Database and Bug Tracker, but really as a Team Orchestrator. It already has all the raw power in it. We just needed to provide it with the Workflow capabilities, but HEY! Wait a minute, there is a product in .Net 3.0 called Windows Workflow Foundation that does just that right?! Yes... And that´s what we´ll be using. We´ll expose the designer of workflows to the user so he can develop the workflows for each customer (or project if you want to) and them just start instances of the workflows that suit that particular customer/project best.
By doing this we are really making the job of coordinating the dev shop a lot easier. And by providing some really nice reports (next iteration), we´ll be helping managers to find out where his/her dev shop is slower, faster and how much work they can actually undertake.
Hopefully this is something that would benefit a lot of people, and I hope, sincerely, that someone will offer to help me in building such a great tool, since so far, all the iterations of both WOM and BHAL have been the sole work of Bernardo Heynemann (me, hehehe). Not complaining, since it´s been a lot of learning so far, but I´d like to deliver faster, and with help that would be a lot easier.
Stay tuned to the next release on BHAL.
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