Archive of Agile Project: Ratings Articles

The second release of nexus went live today (build 127). It included the top features from our prioritized list published yesterday. This enabled the next use case from our first prioritized list of use cases - searching the articles. We also took this opportunity to refactor part of the user interface - adding pagination of articles and search results, and reworking the presentation of the article content based on user feedback.

In this article we look at the content of the third alpha release of nexus.

The next build of nexus starts today as our agile project continues. Let us know what stuff you think is most important for this release, as part of our prioritization.

Rolf presented a valid critique and some questions on our previous article announcing the launch of nexus. I started writing a long response, and realized it would work well as an article for analysis of our process over the last month. Here it is.

The alpha release of our site/product developed as an open agile project has just gone live!

http://tynerblain.com/nexus/ is the home page. More stats and updates below.

In our previous article in the series on the development of nexus, we discussed navigation and information architecture. We identified the challenge of filtering articles by category and by level of experience (beginner / expert), while also viewing the articles along a characteristic (most-viewed, highest-rated, etc). Between both url-creation and visible site-navigation, the challenge we explored was how to present one facet or dimension as primary and others as secondary.

One of our readers presented a third alternative - faceted navigation.

We have an interesting information architecture challenge as part of our agile project. We have talked about browsing and searching articles organized both by category (product management, business analysis, etc) and by level of expertise (beginner, expert). We’re also rating and reviewing the articles, which introduces the ideas of “latest”, “most reviewed”, “highest rated”, etc.

This presents us with a three-dimensional way to approach structuring the information and navigation of the site.

We’ve come up with a name for the site we’re creating as part of our agile project. Read on to see our rationale.

Earlier this week we iterated on our agile project to assure that we have sufficient application security to meet our user’s implicit requrements.
Read on for updates on our implementation of the security constraints, and progress on the next feature to be implemented.

Last night I got some great feedback from the Austin on Rails guys who helped with the deployment technology for our project. I also got a bit of an education about website security. Based on that conversation, I’m adding a new constraint to our project - that it be secure.

Thanks very much to the rock stars who helped us out tonight. Some of these rockstars are former coworkers of mine, and I believe are all active in austinonrails.org. - next meeting is Tuesday (see the website for more details).

In alphabetical order - everyone chimed in to fix, coach and teach at one point or another.Thanks very much to…

• Damon
• David
• Mars
• Ryan
• Shad
• Steve

I hope the links send some visitors your way, and thanks again!