Puzzlepart with openness as core value
The development of Puzzlepart getting very concrete. In the past few months I've been working very hard on getting the entire business concept just right. I've put a lot of emphasis on talking to just about every possible stakeholder in a potential Puzzlepart ecosystem; potential investors, technology analysts, financial analysts, developers, architects, potential customers, and our immediate community. Based on the feedback some of the core concepts has changed and evolved several times over the past few months.
One of the key factors in giving this venture a fair shot in the market is to do something different, and a lot of feedback has been very positive around building a very open and sharing model for development and innovation. These are concepts that truly excites me, and ever since it got evident that Puzzlepart will incorporate a significant open-source element at the core, my enthusiasm for the project has been doubled. I'm actually really psyched about going to work on this for several years to come!
One of the great things about building a business around open and sharing principles is that other leading players are attuned to such strategies. In my previous job we did extensive work on getting an internal production system going in order to keep track of our software development. We established a blend of best-of-breed tools, with cool stuff like Atlassian JIRA & FishEye and Subversion at the core. Back then, the company had to pay license fees for this software, but because Puzzlepart will contribute to the community through open-sourced code, we were eligable for the Atlassian open-source license.
My work with JIRA in Objectware also made me aware of the GreenHopper plugin for JIRA. This helped us out a lot in improving communication in our scrum based projects, and I really wanted to have this plugin onboard for Puzzlepart as well. Fortunately the company developing GreenHopper, GreenPepper, applies the same licensing as Atlassian, and Puzzlepart got licensed for GreenHopper aswell (in less than 1 hour - thanks to Jean-Christophe).
Puzzlepart will employ a scrum development process for virtual distributed teams where visibility in progress, code, changes, and requirements are extremely important. We're making a bet on Atlassian, GreenHopper and Subversion to help us achieve this, and we'd like to take the opportunity to give a lot of credit to Atlassian and GreenHopper for supporting companies and projects that pledges to provide value back to the community through open-sourced software.
For those of you basing your development setup on Microsoft Team Foundation Server it's worth mentioning that GreenHopper also have support for TFS.
If you haven't tried out these tools, you should have a look:
