Project Management

Overview

Cake Solutions combine their real world system programming experience with a high quality apparatus to ensure all projects are delivered on time, on budget and to a high standard.

These tools are being used as part of our ISO9001 quality standard.

Cake Infrastructure & Management Tools

Cake Systems Portal page

The Cake Solutions project management tools are accessed through the Cake Systems Portal page shown below.

Figure 1 Cake Systems Portal Site

Basecamp

Basecamp is a on-line Project Management tool we use to manage smaller website design projects, including e-commerce websites and websites designed using the Magnolia Content Management system. It allows us to plan the project using a to do list and a time line which is totally transparent to our clients. Our clients are encouraged to use it for all appropriate projects as we can share documents with our clients and visa vera as well as communicate with them using the messaging system. This ensures that a client can log on and see exactly where we are up to with a project at anytime. It also allows us to keep a full audit trail of all documentation and correspondence for a project in the event of any future queries. Finally as the system is centrally managed and backed up daily it fits in with our disaster recovery procedures allowing us to be back up and running within 24 hrs of any disaster striking Cake!

Figure 2 Basecamp Dashboard

JIRA

We use Atlassian Jira (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/) as our project management software. Jira allows us to specify the requirements for each version, create and manage project roadmaps and to track any bugs in the software. You will be able to track the progress of the project, submit any new requirements and bug reports. Jira closely integrates with our internal time-tracking management. Typical page showing the status of a project is shown on Figure 1.

Figure 3 Jira project roadmap page

Confluence

We use Atlassian Confluence (http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/) to keep our development team as well as our clients up to date on other news in the company as well as other unrelated, but interesting information. Figure 2 shows typical Confluence page.

Figure 4 Cake Solutions Confluence

CruiseControl

CruiseControl (http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/) is a central tool we use to manage the automated builds. Rather than using complex shell scripts on the server to perform the quite complex nightly build we rely on CruiseControl, which uses more friendly XML syntax to describe the goals that need to be executed to complete the build. This also means that we are not limited to the UNIX platform for our build operations.

Nightly Builds

An important part of our infrastructure is the nightly build setup. A dedicated build server checks out the latest source code from the CVS, compiles the source codes and runs the unit tests. This ensures that the code the programmers have committed to the CVS does not break the code that other programmers have committed during the day. If the tests pass, the latest build is automatically deployed and ready for your review. This procedure ensures that you can see the most up-to-date progress of the project and allows you to make any comments to the functionality in the very early stages of the development, when potential changes are still relatively easy to implement. You can “opt-in” to a mailing list that receives the results of the JUnit tests or you can view the results of the test runs on-line on the testing server (see Figure 3).

Figure 5 JUnit test results in HTML