Report on practice at Zest

published May 13, 2006, last modified May 18, 2007

My practice at Zest Software is finished. I had a great time there and will continue to have that as I will be working there for the rest of my study. That should be another one to one and a half years. I also finished my report on that practice. You can download the report. I will put the full text of the summary here.

Download the full report (pdf).

This report is an overview of my practice at Zest Software. It was a fun and educating time, which is hopefully noticeable when reading this report.

The practice started on November 29th 2005 and ended at April 30th 2006.

Chapter 1 lays the foundation for this report. It introduces Zest Software and the main subject of the practice: the not yet finished eXtremeManagement tool. That is a tool for project management based on the Extreme Programming methodology. It is based on Python, Zope and Plone. A brief overview is given of these technologies.

Chapter 2 discusses several improvements that have been made to the eXtremeManagement tool. Three subjects are highlighted: workflows, task estimation and booking overviews.

eXtremeManagement was released on plone.org. The steps taken to do that can be interesting for others as well. That is why I generalised that process and put it in a tutorial on the documentation section of that website. Chapter 3 contains that tutorial.

Chapter 4 proposes some new features. Automatic assigning of new tasks has already been implemented. Better progress indicators and integration with a bug tracker are still on the wish list. eXtremeManagement should also be moved from the Zest code repository to the Plone collective.

The conclusion in chapter 5 is that the practice was successful. Moreover: I keep working at Zest Software for the rest of my study.