Winter 2010 OSD600 Initial Project Plan

Summary

Your Initial Project Plan is a starting point. It marks the beginning of your work, and does so in a public and open way. You are committing to yourself, to the open source community, and to the web, that this is going to be something that you will do. It is an announcement, and a first draft at laying out the timing and milestones for your work. The plan will change as you go, and your future blogging and communication will always be in response to this initial plan.

You are to choose an individual project from the list of potential projects, and make a claim to it. You do this by announcing a plan to complete the work.

How to do your Initial Project Plan

You are asked to write a detailed blog post, and create a wiki page for your project. Your blog post will be the first of many such announcements and status checks on your work. Your wiki page will contain technical and historical information about releases, work in progress, plans, etc.

Your wiki page should be modeled on the Sample Project template.

Your blog post should include a discussion of all of the following:

Blog Post Guidelines

• What is your chosen project?
  • Describe the project, name it, what is it about?
  • Give some background on the need for this work and why it is important
  • Where is the web page, wiki, bug, etc.?
  • Why have you chosen this project?

• What will your process be for doing this work?
  • Where is your project page and work going to be tracked? You must create this.
  • How can people follow you as you proceed?
  • What is your time line, and when can people expect things from you?

• Plan for 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3 releases
  • What is the scope of the work you will do?
  • What do you plan to accomplish by each release?
  • How will you measure your success at each stage?

• What do you need to learn for each of your releases?
  • Which technologies, languages, toolkits, etc. are you going to need to research for the work?
  • What is your plan for learning these?
  • Which resources will you use and need in order to accomplish the work?

• Who do you need to know and who will you work with?
  • Who have you contacted about the work?
  • What did they say?

• Collaboration and Contribution
  • How can other people get involved in your project? e.g., does your code need to be tested on hardware which you don't have access to? Are there aspects of the project you don't want to do and would appreciate some help with?
  • What types of contributions can you make to other projects?

• What barriers stand in your way?
  • What are you worried about?
  • What are the risks you can foresee?
  • How do you plan to overcome these fears and risks?
  • What are you going to do in order to lessen your exposure to this risk? Can you control for some of it?

Due Date

Your wiki page and blog post must be completed during the week of January 25th, and will be discussed in class the following Tuesday.

For reference, here is an excellent initial project plan from last semester written by Andor Salga.