This Week in OpenNMS: Season 1.6, Episode 37: The Honeymoon Isn't Over

It's time for This Week in OpenNMS. This week we hit a milestone in the
SMS work, made it through our first week of scrumban, and started work
on a number of map-related enhancements.


Project Updates
---------------

- Stable: Current Release is 1.6.6

1.6.6 is the current stable release, tagged September 18th.  It fixes a
number of bugs, and adds a few features.  For a full list, see the
bugzilla 1.6.6 milestone.  This is a non-critical but recommended
upgrade for anyone on OpenNMS versions older than 1.6.6.

     http://tinyurl.com/opennms-166

- Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.6

1.7.6 is the current unstable release, tagged August 3rd.  Since 1.7.5,
there have been a ton of bugfixes, as well as updates to the RESTful
interfaces, inventory report updates, syslogd updates, collection
updates, new OpenManage and Cisco IP-SLA monitors, thresholding updates,
provisiond updates, map updates, and probably more stuff I'm missing.  A
1.7.x overview is available in the release notes on the site.

     http://tinyurl.com/opennms-17x

- Unstable: SMS Pinger/Request-Response API

We wrapped up the last few tasks for the first milestone of the SMS
pinger.  You can attach multiple modems to the OpenNMS system, and
perform SMS and USSD "sequences" much like the page sequence adapter for
HTTP.  We started with a number of interesting use cases:

  * SMS ping: send a "ping" SMS message from one phone to another.
    That phone will respond with "pong" and the latency of that
    transaction will be stored.
  * Carrier balance check: Send a message asking for balance, receive
    back a balance from the carrier.
  * Minute "gifting": Send a USSD message gifting minutes to another
    phone.  Expect a response from the carrier asking for
    confirmation.  Send "1" to confirm that we want to gift minutes,
    and then receive a confirmation from the carrier.

There will probably be lots of other interesting uses for it, now that
the infrastructure is there.

- Unstable: Map Link Enhancements

We also started work on another development project we've been
contracted to do, relating to various map enhancements.  This week we
got the basic specification done, and started work on coding.  The goal,
among other things, will be to be able to query link status of a certain
class of devices, and update the map in real-time with the status of
those links.

We've finished the configuration file format, updated the link model to
not require an SNMP interface for links between nodes, updated the map
UI to handle displaying link status changes, and written the
infrastructure to deal with data link up/down events.

- Unstable: Logging Updates

Dave did some work finally unifying our logging's schizophrenic use of
stderr/stdout and log4j.  He created an adapter for the log4j logger
which will capture stdout and stderr so output.log will no longer grow
out of control.


OGP Conference Call
-------------------

Last week we had a virtual OGP summit conference call over Skype, where
we talked about things we wanted to do in the coming year from a
community point of view.

First we here at The OpenNMS Group talked about our current status.
Despite a slow start, we're having a record year, and have almost more
work than we know what to do with.  We've contracted some work to help
with the load, and are bringing at least one more person on before the
end of the year.

The next item on the agenda was having another user conference.  The
first OpenNMS User Conference[1] was a big success, and we're looking to
grow it this year.  The main question is do we do it again in Europe, or
try to move to North America?  Some folks volunteered to investigate the
options, and we'll let everyone know when we know ourselves what's planned.

After that, we talked about managing community contributions, and
keeping feature branches from going out of date.  At that point I had to
leave the call, so I missed the rest.  I've asked the OGP for a summary
of what else was discussed, but didn't hear back at the time of TWiO
publication. I'll continue this next week. :)

1. http://www.opennms.org/wiki/UCE2009


Scrum-Ban, Week Two
-------------------

So we made it through our first week of scrum-ban, and I have to say,
I've managed to still be excited about it.  ;)  We got a ton of tasks
done for our various custom development obligations, and we've already
hit some of the issues that scrum-ban is great at exposing.

For example, we came in today to do our weekly status and the current
scrum-ban board shows that we can't really move anything out of the
development stage[1] even if they're finished, because we haven't
finished testing the DNS provisioning service and SMS sequence monitor,
and we're only allowed to have 2 things in the "test" phase.

What does this mean?  Rather than trying to do more task work that would
just plug up development, we're focusing on testing existing (finished)
features ("stories") and moving them through the process.  This means
that finished features will actually get into a released state much
faster, which means you guys get to play with them sooner.

Another thing we decided is that we're going to move to a time-based
release schedule.  Since we are tracking features more closely through
the development process, and actively testing more (rather than a
combination of personal testing and "let the community play with it in
snapshots" testing) we can be more confident that the kinks will be
worked out.  You'll note in that image that there's a grey sticky in the
lower-right documenting the next release as October 5th, 2009.  On that
day we'll release 1.6.7 and 1.7.7 (unless an emergency blocker bug
forces an early release, of course...) and then schedule another release
on the first monday of December.

Of course, the biggest thing you'll notice is that we actually have an
image that shows you our current scrum-ban status.  Since many of us
work from home, or travel, it made sense to make our "whiteboard"
available somewhere online.  And, in the spirit of default to open[2],
there is no reason folks in the community shouldn't see that status as
well, and for that matter, pick up a task if you really want to jump in.

You can keep up with the scrum-ban status at any time by going to
http://www.opennms.org/~scrumban/ -- and if you have any suggestions,
please don't hesitate to let us know.  The goal for this process is for
us to get the features we're working on to you (faster!) and to make it
easier to balance our obligation to customers contracting custom
development with our obligation of making sure that OpenNMS stays
up-to-date and quality software that the community can get the most out of.

There are, of course, many bugs to fix[3] as well, and we will be making
it a part of the process to have regular stories for taking care of
"code debt" -- refactoring, bugfixes, etc. that aren't necessarily new
features.

1. http://www.opennms.com/twio/media/scrumban-2009-09-28.png
2. http://tinyurl.com/default-to-open
3. http://bugzilla.opennms.org/


Upcoming Events
---------------

* October 1-2, 2009:
   David Hustace will be speaking at the Open World Forum in Paris,
   France.

   http://openworldforum.org/

* October 28, 2009:
   Tarus Balog will be speaking at the Open Source Monitoring Conference
   2009 in Nürnberg, Germany.

   http://www.netways.de/en/osmc/y2009/referenten/

If you have anything to add to the events list, please let me know.


Until Next Week...
------------------

As always, if there's anything you'd like me to talk about in a future
TWiO, or you just have a comment, criticism, or bulk virtual stickies
for our virtual whiteboard you'd like to share, don't hesitiate to say hi.


-- 
Benjamin Reed
The OpenNMS Group
http://www.opennms.org/

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Come build with us! The BlackBerry® Developer Conference in SF, CA
is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your
developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay 
ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9-12, 2009. Register now!
http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconf

_______________________________________________
Please read the OpenNMS Mailing List FAQ:
http://www.opennms.org/wiki/index.php?page=MailingListFaq

opennms-announce mailing list

To *unsubscribe* or change your subscription options, see the bottom of this page:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/opennms-announce

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.12 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iD8DBQFKwOUqUu+jZtP2Zf4RAmtzAJ9VhAyFBDWGL0hgHO1Iz0rXbzt18QCdEC3s
nbz4gD+zEJPc2E+uYp1oiss=
=nADj
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----