I am pleased to announce the availability of IRIS Process Central Sandbox. This is an online process community to promote discussions on process improvements through collaborative input. Its goal is to bring together process modelers, process consumers, and other stakeholders to freely share information on existing processes and create new process mash-ups.

To facilitate these discussions, we have included several processes on sandbox including MSF for CMMI, OpenUP, and Agile. Where possible, we have provided variety of formats for each process as well as enactment templates.

You can participate by providing your feedback through blogs, discussions boards or modifying the content of the processes. We are eager to get your feedback and will make every effort to ensure that IRIS Process Central Sandbox becomes a valuable asset to you and your organization. Click IRIS Process Central Sandbox to access the sandbox.

IRIS Process Central Sandbox demonstrates how IRIS Process Central which is included as part of IRIS Process Author can help an organization improve their process tailoring in a collaborative environment.

It is our strong belief that through awareness and involvement of process community, there is a great chance of increasing adaptation of processes across the organization. We feel that IRIS Process Central is an important step towards this goal.

We are looking forward to the community participation in IRIS Process Central Sandbox or any suggestions regarding IRIS Process Central product.

On Tuesday October 23rd, I attended the Jazz session in CASCON 07. John Wiegand demonstrated Team Concert which is built on Jazz platform and he took the audience through some project scenarios, mostly from developers’ point of view. I was impressed by Team Concert and liked the user interface, however, as a project manager I was disappointed about the lack of project management support planned for the initial release of Team Concert.

In the beginning of the session, John had mentioned the pain areas that Jazz was addressing, one of which was project management. So I was looking forward to seeing the extend of this support. The functionalities that were demonstrated mostly focused on IDE as well as team collaboration and communication. Project management support was clearly missing, even simple interface to MS Project or MS Excel. I asked John after the session regarding their plan for interfacing to MS Project or MS Excel, he confirmed that it is not part of the initial release of the tool but it is part of their long term plan. He hinted that it is not high in their list of priorities.

From my point of view, for a tool to be used for a small or medium size project, there has to be some project management support. One way to achieve this is by interfacing to MS Project or MS Excel. This would be much simpler than building the support internally and majority of the companies use MS Project and MS Excel. The same way IDE is critical for developer community, interfacing to project management tools is essential for project managements.

We have been using VSTS for enactment of our internal projects and its interface to MS Project is important, although there should be more improvements in this area. I feel that in order for Team Concert to be used in small/medium size team, there needs to be some project management support in place.

In recent years we have seen a trend of software companies, regardless of their size, realizing the benefits of having well defined software development processes in order to increase the success rate of their projects. One cannot argue that when it comes to software processes, one process does not fit all. With this understanding comes the challenge of how to ensure that an organization with a number of software development processes can ensure process selection is made properly.

At the very minimum, an organization needs to have a central place where consumers of the processes can view all available processes and search based on criteria such as process families (e.g. RUP) and process recommendations (e.g. team size). The richer the information included in this process hub, the easier it will be for interested individuals to find the appropriate process. By implementing this central place for processes, companies will see an increase in usage of their software development processes.

The next logical step is for an organization to promote its process center as a vehicle to improve processes through collaborative community input. Traditionally software processes are designed by elite group of highly skilled individuals, often in isolation. Without a feedback mechanism in place, there is no real chance for processes to evolve or survive. With the dynamic nature of software development projects and without the two way approach, processes quickly become obsolete and there will surely be resistance amongst project consumers to follow the processes. Organizations can easily over come this major issue by bringing together the process authors and consumers. Process centre can be a gateway for both parties to come together to share and collaborate on existing processes. The type of feedback can range from the most informal method such as rating system to most constructive such as recommendation on the specific process element or step. By having the wide range of options available, consumers can choose the method which suites them.

A natural way to implement this type of system is through the newly popular Web 2.0 technologies known as the second generation of web-based communities and collaboration tools. This trend in technology and industry addresses the need for collaborative way for the entire organization to work together towards evolving their software development processes and ultimately to increase the success rate of projects. I am pleased to say that we are currently working on a process portal based on Web 2.0 technology which is complimentory to IRIS Process Author. Stay tuned for more blogs regarding IRIS Process Central.