[schooltool-dev] Resource scheduling and PyCon planning

[Tom Hoffman]

Here's where we stand, as I see it:

The main banner goal of the sprint is to finish resource management,
so it will be beta testable in VA this spring and solid and usable for
schools in the fall.

Dave Welsh, Jason Straw and I spent a fair amount of time last week
discussing the scope of the requirements for resource scheduling.  A
fair amount of that was spent getting up to speed with the current
implementation.  Happily, everyone eventually agreed that we have a
very solid foundation already, and what is needed is some UI
improvements, fit & finish, printable reports and documentation.

Dave and Jason have been working on a spec on the CanDo wiki.

https://svn.schooltool.org/trac/cando/wiki/ResourceImprovementSpecification

Jeff is going to move it to LaunchPad, iirc.  One big thing that is
missing is more detail on the UI.  We could still use much more
specific use cases, like what sequence of events should lead to a
resource being booked.

I would propose that the first thing we'll need to do when we start
working on resource tracking is to spend a few hours going over the
existing functionality together and making sure it works the way we
think it does, because if we start out with misunderstandings about
what does and does not work now, we'll be sunk.

A second major goal is LDAP support and GuildHall integration, which
will primarily be done by Ian Benson and his developers, who will be
joining us at the sprint.  Just so there is no confusion, they are
being paid by the project for this work, and it is their
responsibility, but it is clearly in everyone's interest to help them
create something that is nicely integrated into CanDo and SchoolTool
and works well.

I also think we need to set aside a few hours before the sprint but at
some point during PyCon to do some serious bug triaging and get our
Malone repository into shape.  I know that when I've tried to go
through bugs on my own, in almost every case I feel like I'd need to
ask ignas at least before I'd change anything substantial, so I tend
to just stay away from it (rather than send ignas 50 emails...).  So
this is something we can probably benefit from doing while we're all
in a room together.

--Tom