We need a specification (and a wiki?)

[Josh Berkus]

On 05/03/2013 08:17 AM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> Josh Berkus wrote:
>> I'm not clear on the difference between serious evaulation criteria and a
>> lightweight specification.
> 
> You're right, it's probably a distinction about a difference.  I mainly don't
> want to get bogged down into "writing specs" for the project.  The goal of
> the first phase is to evaluate the Free Software codebases available and pick
> the best possible one to build an NPO accounting system upon.  I think we
> have a good sense already of what features we need, and Conservancy is going
> to be rapidly using what we're building in a real world scenario where we can
> try and experiment (and fail ;) with immediate real-world deployments.

Well, we also need a list of features which are needed/desired/not
important/not wanted, in a fair bit of detail.  We'll be asking the
partisans of various existing OSS accounting systems (OFBiz, LedgerSMB,
xTuple) and other software (CiviCRM) to make estimates of the difficulty
of "porting" these projects to our requirements.  That requires having
the requirements, and in enough detail so that someone who isn't an NPO
treasurer can understand them.

It's been my experience, for example, that ERP designers tend to
drastically underestimate the number of changes needed for an ERP system
to become an NPO system.  Only a detailed list of requirements will make
this clear.

Further, once we start talking about needed features, I think we'll find
that the Conservancy has some quirks to your accounting which aren't
shared with other organizations.  Again, the requirements process brings
this out.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com