Award Sounds

I'm getting tired of illogical choices when implementing open-source projects.

What's the issue?

Project developers providing packages that deploy packaged components whether you already have them already or not.

I'm closely watching the forum relating to Web2Project, specifically the thread on Dependencies and Tasks Completion.

I was initially looking for an Open Source Project Management application and after trying a few, including stopping using OpenProj, I've found Web2Project as a good contender. It does have some issues though.

What do I like about it?

I like the activity in the forum.

Background

I've been busy recently evaluating Web Application Frameworks for a current project. It's a simple idea and I wanted to use an up-to-date framework rather than code everything from scratch. Here's a quick breakdown on what I found.

I've written before about using OpenProj as a suitable open-source application for project management. Now that I've more chance to use it in anger (e.g. with projects consisting of over 200 tasks), I've noticed a number of anomalies. Mainly these occur in the scheduling.

I posted earlier about a diagram of vtiger's data schema. The actual scheme is referenced at vtiger's wiki.

It is not an ERD (Entity Relationship Diagram) nor is it a Class Model. That's what I was originally looking for since I spend more of time working at the logical or conceptual levels rather than the physical.

What's Vtiger?

Vtiger is an open-source CRM suite, originally forked from SugarCRM due to the commercial activities of the SugarCRM team. Vtiger aims to be open-source, although it does have the possibility of purchasable extensions, much like Joomla. There is a lot of history in the fork, much of it best left alone. The main point to remember is that SugarCRM and Vtiger are released under different licences. You need to check that the functionality you require is available under the licence you wish to use.

Although not listed on the vtiger website, it is possible to install vtiger CRM on Mac OS X. I'll briefly describe the steps I went through to get it to work.

I was curious about the relationships between Contacts, Accounts, Leads and Potentials, so I needed a reverse engineering package.

Fabforce Designer/MySQL Workbench

FabForce Designer was a great little application on Windows and seems to have stagnated a little under MySQL's auspices. It's recently been released for OS X, but the recent release requires 10.5 (Leopard) and I'm still on 10.4 (Tiger).

How would you process map a cup of tea?

I once had a recruiter vet me based on whether I could process map a cup of tea. I think he was new to the job and was fed a script from his client.

What's the actual answer?

Firstly, a cup of tea isn't a process. You can't map a cup of tea. It's an object, not a process. You can process map the process of making a cup of tea, but not the cup of tea itself.

I mentioned before about a process having a single output. In other words, in a sequential process where one process step is performed after another, then there will usually only one output at a time.

If there are two outputs, it's often a good sign that it should be a decision point or a gateway instead of a process step.