A quick update before a break

It's August and I have decided like the rest of Europe to take some time off. But this does not mean that the project will stop. Life and development will still be occurring.

Today though, the WebPA project has been held high as an example again. This time rather than from inside the project it came from the Programme manager David down a JISC drumming up support for the UK round of IMS award short lists. I would say that any JISC project should have a go. The reward to the project is phenomenal in terms of credit to the project team and also lead institution.

We are also in the process of writing a paper which will hopefully be accepted into the special issue of the BJET. But only time will tell.

However, when back we will be gearing up to make a new release of the WebPA tool, providing people with enough time to get an installation working before the next semester. If you are interested in using WebPA or installing it I suggest that you contact the project. If you do take the WebPA tool and use it you could join our list of adopting institutions.

The open source mantra

I have been heard to repeat frequently the mantra of "we need to release frequently and often." However as some of you know we have only made a single release so far. I am gearing up to make a release in the new year, the delay is for Christmas, also taking into account the start of the new academic year and other factors.

But this morning, in my daily reading of what is happening in the world and in particular the world of open source I came across this entry posted by Zack Urlocker, where he talks about 'release early, release often' and what they are doing at MySQL with the 'feature previews' . This may be something that WebPA can adopt to ensure that we meet our aims to release frequently, but still ensure that we can release at major mile stones. But before I dive in feet first I will see how they get on at MySQL and if they are successful then we can look at adopting this concept. It may be that the concept will work really well for larger projects but not scale as well for smaller one programmer projects.