ODT-0147 (StudiVZ) Social Networking – Best practices

Project Details StudiVZ is the largest and fastest growing student network in Europe. Launched in October 2005, it is used today by 1,000,000 students in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. This represents 30% of all university students enrolled in these countries In September 2006, studiVZ was successfully introduced into further European lands such as Poland, France, Italy and Spain. The aim of the international strategy is to establish the network culture within European universities and schools and open up boundaries by providing a European wide communications platform

Project Details Project Team (9 people) 1 project manager 1 technical lead 5 PHP developers 2 software testing specialists Technologies Development: PHP, JavaScript, Ajax, HTML, CSS, MySQL, Apache, Memcached (object caching system), Sphinx (full- text search engine) Management: MS Project, Jangal (custom change request management tool), Confluence WiKi Change Management: Subversion Testing: Mercury QuickTest, SilkPerformer

Project Features Process specific: Iteration planning Pair programming of complicated and mission critical features Regular Skype chats with the whole development team and the client for operative activities coordination and tasks clarification

Project Features Product specific: Multilanguage support Flexible features set configuration which allowed the team to create SchuelerVZ, a version of the project for high school students Distribution of database load between several servers on affected tables basis An asynchronous template generation engine integrated with the translation tool Automatic notification engine with a dedicated database and an SMTP server

Iteration Planning The client creates a new iteration within the Jangal tool and adds a set of story cards with indicated priorities Story cards are estimated and assigned to developers The iteration plan is created in MS Project in accordance with Jangal When developers start working on a SC, they track the duration and remaining time on a regular basis When a SC is completed, its marked as Implemented, so QAs can start testing When testing is complete, the SC is marked as Tested (or Open if tests failed) An iteration is considered finished after all SCs are marked as Tested

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