At the moment we're in the middle of our second iteration. And we decided that it is about time to give you some additional information on our progress. We've managed to integrate Maven and Ant, and we have Sophie 2.0 builds using these technologies. We're adopting a new workflow that will help us to distinguish the different phases of each task. It will also give us the opportunity to leave comments, which is a very useful capability. After the first iteration, which was more "documents/standards oriented", we're beginning to focus on coding tasks related to Sophie's basic functionalities. We're also working on the first iteration's three unfinished tasks.

As we move forward our team will expand so that our pace or work can be maintained and all defined objectives met. The expanded team will also help to ensure that we always achieve the highest possible quality for each and every milestone.

So far, so good! At the end of this iteration there will be a post with more detailed information about what we've accomplished, and what we expect to do for the next iteration.

The Astea Solutions Sophie Team.

Hello to all who are interested in the Sophie 2.0 development process! With the end of our first iteration comes our first post in the blog about the current status of the project.

As some of you may already know, we've managed to complete virtually all tasks for ITERATION_01, and now we're looking forward to beginning our next iteration. As a fully open source project, information about Sophie 2.0's progress of Sophie 2.0 is publicly available at ​http://asteasolutions.net:7080/sophie2/wiki/SCS_SITE_DESIGN/DevelopmentHome. There you can find more detailed information about the tasks we're working on and their state.

As a whole, during this iteration we've established some fundamental standards concerning work processes and created templates for task completion how-tos. Most of our work was concentrated on writing documents and templates that will ease our work in the future. Although we've made a lot of changes that cost us time in refactoring already finished tasks according to the new templates, we now have a firm base that can use going forward.

Our goal for the next sprint is to increase productivity, so that we do everything on time. For the second iteration we have 61 planned tasks and 3 unplanned tasks (left from the previous sprint). These should be completed by 2008-10-31. We've also took some decisions on how to improve:

• Focus time - from :15 to :00 of each hour is time to focus. No distractions are allowed during focus-time. If it is absolutely essential to communicate with someone, the communication should be done in such a way that it does not disturb other team members.
• Task ordering - as part of SCHEDULE_MAINTENANCE task, the tasks should be ordered in the appropriate way.
• Maintenance tasks should be completed first (and not last).
• As part of WIKI_SETUP someone should ensure that everything is up after any possible power failure.
• In order for people to have a better idea as to what each task is about, we should describe each planned task briefly at the beginning of the iteration. The results of these are in m02-descriptions-bg.txt and m02-descriptions-en.txt
• We have decided to have a weekly meeting, every Monday at 10:00 (EEST). These meetings must not be long, and every participant must be there on time. The weeklies will consist of a short report from everyone, on "What were you doing the last week", "What will you do the next week", "Impediments", followed by a tech presentation (of a library, technology, tool, etc.) or a design discussion. Everything should be no longer than 1 hour.

Going forward we will inform you of our progress at the end of each iteration.