Over the last week, I have been giving a good portion of my time to the Rainbow Project. With the help of others in the Rainbow Team, Eric and I have started to make positive improvements to the organization and the software. (Links:
Eric's Rainbow Blog,
Rahul's Rainbow Blog)
As Project Manager and Admin, I have been working to create a big picture of where we are and where we are going. Right now the proposed teams are in the process of forming as we are still in the initial recruiting phase to find the right members for each. Five core teams will be needed to
carry out specific functions. In order to compete with commercial software, I am organizing this team as if it were a commercial organization.
Read More about our new Team Structure
A different customer centric site strategy has been proposed as well. All Rainbow Sites will be redesigned and re-architected to serve the customer's needs. The main site will be broken up into three separate sites. One to convince prospective customers to use our software and provide a launch pad to our other sites, one to cater to the information needs for existing customers, and another to be completely focused on support.
Read More about the new Sites
I am going to be imposing very strict standards in all of our efforts such as design and architecture. I tend to know what's good in design in architecture, but I'm going to let the designers and architects come up with their plans of actions.
Read More about Design Guidelines
As far as development goes, I am employing what I learned at Merrill Lynch and Independence Air to produce software. We are utilizing a mixture of normal open source grass roots development with a more formal system. Each developer will get their own sandbox to work with the code. As their functionality becomes real and works in their environment, Architects will approve these changes to go into DEVINT environment. After this, the team goes through a process to integrate, test, and release the product.
Read More about our Production Methods If you are interested in where Rainbow is going, I suggest you start looking at the
Rainbow Community Site. We are constantly blogging about what we are working on.