So Doug is excited about how we took our first steps in a new product and how well it went. Personally, I’m impressed with the way that we presented all the usual engineering setup tasks to the client in a client focussed manner. We could have done it better by not discussing up front all the engineering tasks we were hiding behind the suggested first story, but that’s okay. The first story was that we wanted to ship a distribution of the new product. It’s really quite backwards to think of things that way – normally you build the product then work out how to package and distribute it, but it’s impossible to ship anytime if you don’t build the distribution mechanism at the start.

So hidden in that story was the following engineering tasks:

• Create a subversion repository.
• Create a build process (including managing build numbers, version numbers etc).
• Create a change log.
• Create zip file for distribution.
• Add the project to cruise control so it is automatically built.
• Adjust our “AutoDeployer” to be able to deploy the built zip file to the web site.

We also found time to pay back a bunch of technical debt left around our systems:

• Cleaned up some cruft in our Subversion repository that we don’t use anymore.
• Fixed the build process for our IWWCM integration so it runs about 10 times faster and builds only trigger when appropriate – they were triggering on unrelated changes in subversion.
• Cleaned up and improved the AutoDeployer.

Not to mention, we’ve learnt a lot about starting new products from scratch and gotten that process up and running quite well. I guess you could say I’m excited too.