When we decided to kick this project into full gear, it became clear that we would need an on-line presence and fast. Between the team members, we have experience with numerous development languages and content management systems. One of the technologies Hostmysite.com has long embraced has been ColdFusion, so naturally I was asked to put something together in ColdFusion to show off the project.

I was given a multitude of requirements and wish lists of things that would be nice to see on the site, many of them made it into the pages you see now, and some of them are still to come. But, being able to get a production ready site out in three weeks wasn’t very easy considering I could only commit about 10 hours a week to the project outside of work. Yet, thanks to the RAD approach to development with ColdFusion and lucking out with some really nice pre-packaged blog software (Mango Blog) we were able to get things up and running in no time.

Team Development

You can read about each team member in the About page, but how did we put together such a bang up crew? At the time this project started, Earl was a Support Supervisor here at Hostmysite.com and the majority of the Drag Bike Team was already on Earl's support team. We canvassed each of our abilities: Shawn builds bikes, Earl can manage, Brent develops ColdFusion, Bryan K can setup MS SQL replication, etc; we had the majority of what we needed already in a great team with high moral and camaraderie. As word got out that we got the green light for the project, we had requests from throughout the company of people wanting to get involved. We knew we could use as much help as possible and gladly welcomed everyone. In short order, the team as we know it emerged and things quickly got underway.

Managing Everyone

One of the hardest tasks (besides building a screaming electric drag bike, with two servers on board that stream data back to our Delaware datacenters) was getting and keeping the team organized. How do you keep a team of 15 core members with another 5 – 10 people as needed on-track and organized?

We used a variety of tools and strategies to keep things together. One of the first things we did after things started rolling was to implement a private wiki for the team. This has been instrumental in our ability to track everything from database connection information, deadlines and due dates, and most importantly our Scrum notes. The wiki is now our main source of information for everything bike related and each team member actively updates the information for all.

We quickly implemented an agile methodology with weekly scrum meetings to keep everyone updated on our progress. When your team’s work schedules are as varied as ours (with most working 3pm – Midnight, some working 9am – 5pm and some not even on site) in-person scrums hold us together. With those not making it in person available over the phone, we are able to get all the minds in one room to determine what needs to be completed in the next week. Without the scrum/agile methodologies, we’d likely be many months away from having anything completed.

Our early decisions continue to pay-off as we near completion, Earl has since moved to another position within Hostmysite.com; and the team easily copped since we still have weekly meetings and the wiki.

Coming up in my next post: developing a web site with only a few hours a week.

Over the past several months the entire bike team has come together to plan on the fly, design on the fly and implement as much as possible as fast as possible. Recently we have moved to the agile development method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development). This is a method that HostMySite (HMS) has moved to a while back and it has proven to be very successful. For this reason we have adopted the agile method. We have adopted a bi-weekly scrum and a bi-weekly demo session.

The build team has done well at pulling together to create a one off project. Every time a new curve ball is thrown our way, the team regroups and discovers a new way to make it happen. The project started with a single server streaming data about the bike and has now grown into multi server complex build with a .Net front end. Moving to agile will assist in overcoming the curve balls and ensuring the project posts without error. For now we may not always respond to ping, but rest assured we have the bandwidth and resources to obtain the world record.

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