After working through all of the outstanding issues with all of the contracting work for CaseySoftware, we are about to start full steam on the dotProject development. Our projected timeline is below. I believe that by making it public, it will provide some transparency into our organization and hopefully demonstrate the commitment of CaseySoftware to the further development of dotProject, Mantis, and a variety of other Open Source Projects.

As you can tell from reviewing the schedule, the dotProject/Mantis integration is our top priority. It's been discussed in the dP forums quite a bit, but I have been away from it due to contracting. Immediately after this will begin our effort to push dotProject into being a complete Project Management Suite. Our first step in this process will be the completion of a Risk Management Module based on code initially developed by another dP contributor. Next, will be one of the most important modules that I believe dotProject has seen to date, an Earned Value Management Module.

Earned Value Management is the current evaluation method favored by many contracting organizations – especially when contracting for the US government. While there are short comings with this method (more on this later), it can serve as another tool in the arsenal of an effective Project Manager.

After this, an investigation of the entire dotProject system will occur in order to create a module (or modify an existing module) to provide a complete audit trail of all activity within the system. As I mentioned in my post yesterday, this is vital in order to demonstrate the integrity of the system to users and clients. Until this point is reached, the rest of the integration efforts will be listed solely as “Research”. Once that time gets closer, we'll re-evaluate and see what's going on.

In the meantime, if you have comments on any of the efforts, ideas, or even criticism, feel free to let us know. Our support forums will be online shortly.

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