It's nearly Christmas

So Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Enjoy the holidays if you want and enjoy my good will if you don't, or just don't feel identified with it.

Meanwhile we have advanced a lot. Yesterday we had a review of the things we are doing and it looked quite impresive.

- Rafa showed tier rating. Now you can use tiers (i.e. from 0 to 2 CPU --> x $/month, 2-4, another amount).... and also a new way to tariff: fixed+variable. Easier to say than to do, I should say. This is a great enhancement, as we know can make tariffs that covers a lot of new uses - with the example that now we can use the same schema that Red Hat uses in its subscription model.
- Amaury showed us the new interface to edit rates. You can now add rows in a table instead of having all the options already there. It will become quite important when we increase the number of options allowed.
- Tamara showed us how to put currencies into the rates, and the initial translation of CF4 into Spanish.

On the other hand, we have new offers to collaborate in the project from different companies. Too early to say, but I expect a significant increase of resources with the start of the new year... coming from different companies.

We also have decided to take a try of an open source project to follow our scrum process
https://tree.taiga.io/

We used Trello before and is great, but we were lacking some measurements that would be great to have, let's see how we adapt to the new platform.

Next steps are harder. We have done everything we can without modifying the models, and now we need to change configuration files, models and everything around.
Focus points: assignment of rates to users, resources and groups, and being able to charge at different levels, not only with the data coming from the C&U database. We are also starting to see how we can integrate with external billing systems.

We've had some contacts with opencell, an open source billing company and product, and we need to work hard on that.

Stay close, this is going to evolve quickly.

Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/07anycolouryoulike/6566897119/

Another sprint goes by and we have something to celebrate

Let's celebrate!

 

So... we've got the first functionality inside ManageIQ. On time for the next version of the tool... and it has costed us some blood, I have to say.



Let's cellebrate :D This week is Red Hat Week, and we are proud to reach a milestone in our little project.

https://github.com/ManageIQ/manageiq/pull/4887

It has taken 11 days to merge it.... And we have learnt a lot while we worked on it.

First:

You need to visually know what you intend to do... We had a revision web conference and discovered that we had agreed to deliver something... that was not what we wanted.

Solution: mockups of the final solution. Now we are doing it first, with the rspec: Tests and mockups to know what we want exactly the tool to do.
It is such a stupid thing  trying to use TDD and fail on doing this properly.
Consequence: some functionality won't be included in ManageIQ until we refactor it because we have learnt a lot - meaning: we have done it wrong.

Second:

We need to focus more in the basis, iteratively. Git, patternfly, ruby, rails, we can't take them for granted, we need to improve how we do things. We make mistakes, we don't understand why tools are used for... and one month later you know why that functionality was there...

Third:

Sometimes the business part of things is hard. Even being myself the product owner, I don't get specifications detailed enough to make everything understandable, and thus it is good we are using Scrum... Imaging if we discovered that the functionality was wrong after 3 months instead of 3 weeks.... We wouldn't be talking about learning, but other things.

Second sprint

We have closed the second sprint.

Wow! Things are more complex than we expected. This sprint we have focused on upgrading what is already there:
 - Change how rates are defined. Now we can define a tariff in different units (i.e. 1€/KHz/month or 10€/MHz/month, etc)
- Tiered rates. Now we can define tiers for rating (1-2 CPU 5€/mont, 3-4 CPU 9€/mont, etc)
- Currency management, we have starting adding definition for currencies.

And then we came to Rails... Coding an enterprise grade application is complex, and there is a bunch of controllers that we need to understand... and we couldn't.

So we have closed the sprint a little too soon and we will need to continue working on this. We needed to take the decission of whether to delay the sprint for a week or close it as it is... and we decided to close it. No demo to be shown, a lot of things learned.

Now we need to define the next sprint.

Gathering requirements

So, in a closed development process,  the main (and only?) source of information would be the customer. Perhaps with a little bit of work on our side to see how that can be reused, and even with more than one customer been queried about their opinion.

In this case, the result has to be good and useful for the community, so I am opening an open wiki:

https://sites.google.com/site/chargethecloud/

You are invited to participate, comment, and enhance it... I will be reviewing comments and requests for enhancements to the content.

Let's make this a real solution, with a clear definition of what is needed and the priorities of it.