Earlier I blogged about a new blog series that I am starting this year and will continue over the next few months. The idea is to document the process of creating a real product from start to finish. Since I am not making this a real business venture at this time, I will only focus on the technology side of thing.

This project will satisfy different needs for me. I find it easier to blog about real life scenarios so this project should facilitate that. Also, I am teaching a Systems Integration class which typically entails getting a “corporate client” so the students can build a project from start to finish. The problem with this approach is that in most cases the “client” does not get too involved in the project and often have very rigid technology requirement like using tools that are a few generations old. While I think it is important to expose students to the real world, I would much rather have then build something with current technologies.

The Project  
Codename “Woodland” (every cool project needs a codename) is something I wanted to build for about a year now. When I released my first Windows Phone App, my church quickly asked me to port the app over to other platforms.

As we looked into porting the app we soon realized that the way the audio (Bible studies) was stored made it real difficult for the data to be retrieve. The media itself was not hard to find but the meta data behind it was non excitant. When first build my app, I did it by literally copying hundreds of studies and build around the information I had available. However, since we now wanted to make this the official apps for the church, we wanted to provide more functionality. To do this we needed to build a new catalog with media metadata and other workflow features build into it. However, due to time and resource constraints, we decided to just buy a service that provided the church with the features needed .

So why build one? Well, it is my goal to provide this service to other churches that cannot afford to pay for. I also had other ideas that I thought would be cool to have.

At a very high level the project is divided into three different components: The Media Portal, APIs and Mobile Clients.

Project Plan
Since, this not a one man project, I needed to organized the project from the very start. To do this, I decided to use Scrum principals to help me manage the project.  This is obviously not the perfect scenario to run a Scrum project but I think it is important to expose the students to real world project management frameworks. Also, I was able to get my hands of the new hosted TFS service which has awesome support for Scrum. It took 5 minutes to create the project including adding users, backlog and initial sprint information.

Well, that is all for now…stay tune as project Woodland starts taking shape.