Event Type > Matterhorn Meeting > Matterhorn Leadership and Planning Meeting
Matterhorn Leadership and Planning Meeting
This meeting, funded by grants from the Hewlett and Mellon foundations, was the first post-proposal planning meeting. The high level goals for the meeting were:
- "Iteration": Gain confidence/clarity around day to day activities for iteration 1 (first month of project)
- "Vision": Confirm alignment of product vision
- "Practice": Codify communication, management, and development/design practices
- "Team": Build community in order to work as a cohesive and productive team
The major outcome of the meeting was to develop an iteration 1 plan for each domain as well as a high level release plan.
For clarification around some of the terms that have become part of the Matterhorn working language, please reference the Matterhorn Glossary for definitions of some of the concepts used during the meeting (in development).
Attendees
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Monday: "Vision Alignment"
Agile Process Overview
Adam Hochman presented an overview of Agile processes [link to keynote coming], including an overview Greenhopper, an overlay to JIRA that we will use for the Matterhorn project to manage user stories and tasks. Matterhorn’s JIRA/Greenhopper environment is in the process of being set up, and once ready, Adam will develop an Introduction to Greenhopper screencast.
Design the Box
Toward exploring and aligning our vision for Matterhorn, participants divided into 4 teams (Scheduling/Capture, Encoding/Processing, Distribution and Engage), and each team was asked to “Design the Box.” This activity was a creative and collaborative way for the team to develop a common vision of our target customer, the need Matterhorn is fulfilling, our product name and category, key benefits, compelling reasons to buy, and how we are compare with competitors. Check out the boxes that were created!
 Capture Team |
 Processing Team |
 Distribution Team |
 Engage Team |
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Business Analysis and User Experience Activities
Judy Stern and Allison Bloodworth provided an overview of the Business Analysis and User Experience roles and processes. The Matterhorn BA/U Team was proposed as a unified team working together as a cross-project resource to help the Matterhorn team understand & design for user and business needs that will be more likely to be adopted and used successfully. The following UX/BA activities were proposed for Matterhorn: Interviews/Contextual Inquiries, Use Case documentation, Process documentation & analysis, User modeling, User Story writing, Service modeling, User Interaction design, Visual User Interface design, Usability & Acceptance testing
Story Mapping
Using the initial set of stories that were developed for the proposal, participants collaborated to develop a first pass at the "story map." The Story Map shows us a single view of the entire system that’s valuable for forming an incremental release strategy (Jeff Patton). For Matterhorn, the story map was divided into 5 phases - Scheduling, Capture, Processing, Distribution, and Engage. Each story was placed on the map according to it's place along the continuum of time (horizontal axis) and criticality (vertical axis). Through discussion, several stories were clarified, elaborated on, or split into 2 or more stories. A first pass was made to divide the stories into those to be included in the first release (6 months). The groups continued to add detail to and refine the story map throughout the week.
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Tuesday: "SOA"
Participants engaged in a full day of training and lab activity focused on SOA. The training was conducted by Alex Rosen of MomentumSI. Alex covered SOA concepts and methodologies in the morning, and then participants spent the afternoon in a lab activity modeling services for the "distribution" phase of Matterhorn.
Wednesday: "Technologies, Process, and 1st Release Cycle"
Matterhorn Technology Stack Proof of Concept
Josh Holtzman and Tobias Wunden presented a proof of concept for the Matterhorn technology stack and technical landscape for the team's consideration. The first part of the session was a presentation that walked through the proposed technologies and technical requirements. Following the presentation, many of the developers downloaded the latest version of the source code and explored the programming structure (see http://www.opencastproject.org/project/developer_quickstart).
- Recommended Reading: What is a Java Content Repository (JCR)?
- EasyMock Junit Testing
Communication and Process
Several channels were identified for the team's day-to-day communication, including Skype, iChat, Adobe Connect, Planet Opencast, Twitter, Facebook. A summary of all communication channels for the Matterhorn project, along with guidelines for the use and purpose of each, will be published soon. As far as determining which communication channel to use when, the team was urged to consider using whatever they are most comfortable with, but to also use a variety of channels to reach a wider audience. Michelle will work on some sort of aggregation of feeds (e.g.blog posts, tweets) on Opencastproject.org.
- Matterhorn Project Communication Channels (in progress)
First Release Cycle Planning (initial 6 months)
Participants broke into teams (Scheduling/Capture, Processing/Encoding, Distribution and Engage) and further explored the story maps for their areas. Through this process, story cards were split into sub-stories as needed, prioritized along the 6-month vs 1.0 release, and dependencies were identified.
Thursday: "Iteration 1 Plan"
Iteration 1 Planning
Thursday focused throughout the day on evolving the story map, both in teams and collectively as a group. Several requirements, dependencies and constraints were identified (to be posted soon).
Risk Analysis and Mitigation
The team collectively identified areas of concern and risk in terms of our ability to achieve our goals. Discussion ensued regarding ways to mitigate these risks.
Friday: "Continued Iteration Planning"
Sponsor Engagement (Matterhorn Board)
The day started with a videoconference with several partners where an update on our story map were shared and discussed. Adam presented our overview of user stories anticipated for our 6-month release, and also the risks that had been identified.
Release Planning
Story PointsThe teams continued to break down story cards, identifying tasks for each story for iteration 1 and iteration 0. Tasks were also assigned "story points". Story points are an agile approach to determining the complexity of a give story or task on a scale of 0 (super easy) to 144 (super complex).
Where possible tasks were assigned to individuals or groups. Initial drafts of stories, tasks and story points are provided below:
Videolectures.net
Peter Kese of Videolectures.net gave an impromptu presentation overviewing the Videolectures.net developments, including their work on semantic metadata enhancement (automated categorization, speech indexing/search) and the Open Content Distribution Netowrk (CDN) project.
