[ZDP] the be all end all interface project

[Michel Pelletier]

Greetings,

I am mailing you folks to inform you of the inception of a new Project
at Digital Creations that I am heading: documenting the most commonly
used and most critical interfaces in Zope, and devising a framework for
continuing to document Zope interfaces as they are (reverse or newly)
engineered.

If you are recieving this email, then research has indicated you have an
interest, at least passing, in this field.  Since we at DC have a long
history of flailing in the gale force winds of the community, I am
asking all of you to please let me know if you would like to
participiate in this project.  Just about the only thing that will be
asked of you is to read, and give a thumb up or down on what you see. 
Obviously, more serious participation is encouraged.  This is just one
project in our new documentation effort; this is not a placebo message
to put off what needs to be done now; this is an official, funded
project of DC that is allready rolling (albiet only two of us are
pushing so far... ;)

This is just an introductory email, there is little detail here on the
things that I am working on, however, those of you who reply to this
email will receive another email shortly pointing you to an area on the
Zope site that contains the Vision, Requirements, Use Cases, Schedule,
and other documents and artifacts of this project.  This material should
be enough for you to start understanding the direction that we want to
go.

One of the most difficult tasks to overcome is the sychronization of
community and company efforts.  We here have been trying, over the past
year or so, to devise a development process to guide our engineering and
documentation efforts.  It is a hard task: processes such as this are
few and far between in the open source community, we are new at it, you
are new at it, and no one, including ourselves, knows quite how these
things will work out.

So to enlighten you on how we think it's done (or at least how I think
it's done), here is a short plan for the next couple of weeks to get
this project on track:

Inception:

  This is sort of the deep, philosophical thinking phase of the
project.  This is where the project's Vision (why are we going to do
this?) and Scope (how extensive will it be? what will we NOT do?) are
determined.  These may sems like trivial matters, but without a clear
defintion of what we want from the beginning, things will just get
fuzzier.  Currently, I am in this phase, but I don't want to pass onto
the next one without your input.

Elaboration:

  This phase includes understanding Use Cases (who needs to do what?)
and Requirements (what should this project definatly do in finite
terms?).  I have some use cases and requirements culled from discussions
with Amos and others, but your input here would definatly help.  From
everyone's unique perspective, more can be seen than from just mine.

After Elaboration are more phases, but I won't get into that now.  I
hope this quick explanation gives you an idea of where things will be
going in the next couple of weeks.

Further, I need your assistance to help collect all those little things
out there that we can reuse, like the Zope Quick Ref and the Zope API
docs project.  If you know of other 'interfaceish' projects going on, I
would love to hear about them (that doesn't just mean Zope only, we'd
love steal as much as possible from other open source projects, that's
the spirit right?).

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing from you.

-Michel