CMS - from scratch to sourcecode

It is already in the end of May and all of us are, besides some public holidays, already busy for three weeks with creating the Child Monitoring System.

Geert Jan de Boer, Gerrit Koopmans, Mark Manders en Ruud Rietveld, together with our Indian colleagues Animesh Kumar and Ashok Aritakula, are very busy developing the required functionalities in the Child Monitoring System. They're doing this, after it has cost a lot of time to solve issues that had to do with environments, synchronization, check-ins and check-outs of sourcecode, realization of the database, etcetera.
Vincent Hegeman has, together with our Indian colleague, Arpuda 'Mary' Theerka Das, already made quite some progress with writing the Use Cases. They provide our developers a basis to realize the system, as required by MV Foundation. For writing the Use Cases we mostly use the documentation written by our colleagues and analysts Mark Artz and Geert Mouwen, who went to MV Foundation in India in March.

Until now the contact with our Indian colleagues is remarkable and special. Each of them is very interested in who we are, they are very committed to the project, they work very hard and on top of all they are very friendly and kind. Most of the time the contact is via Office Communicator. Via this medium we communicate en discuss a lot. We also had contact by phone, but that requires a lot of concentration. Our 'Dutch' English is quite different from 'Indian' English.

On Saturday June 13th Gerrit and Vincent will leave the Netherlands by plane. Not straight to Hyderabad, where the head office of MV Foundation is located, but first via Frankfurt to Bangalore. At the Logica office in Bangalore we will meet our Indian colleagues and we will exchange information with them as well, after we had a full day to get used to the climate (40 degrees Celsius) and the food (it is said that we should never forget to take tissues or toilet paper and drink no water from the tap). After our visit to Bangalore, we'll leave for Hyderabad. There we shall show our CMS prototype to MV Foundation. In over a week time we will collect issues and defects and adapt other requirements by MV Foundation. Probalby we will solve issues and defects in the Netherlands and maybe also in Bangalore, to mutate CMS from a prototype into a reliable and suitable end product. In that week we will also visit some schools to see with our own eyes how a school registers childrens' data and what a school does with those data and what MV Foundation does with those data as well.

So far the job is very nice and interesting and it's done by a congenial devoted project team. One of the biggest challenges is to realize most of the required functionalities in a short time of throughput.