Building a QA Site for CuencaTravel.com

On Wednesday, January 29, I met Patricio Pesantez. He had responded to my flyer posted at the Cuenca Polytechnic University looking for intern partnerships.

We met at La Fornace, my favorite pizza place in Cuenca and I showed him a presentation I’d put together about my concept for a website, CuencaTravel.com. He liked the idea, and agreed to work part time on it. We will share ownership 60% (me) / 40% (him).

I’ve spent the last few days planning and getting infrastructure ready. Today is February 1, the first scheduled day of the internship, and so far, right on target. I’ll have leave Ecuador on March 25 because my visa was cut short when I renewed it. I had originally planned to return to the USA on April 13. That cuts a week off of the planned time, but it’s not that big of a deal.

I registered CuencaTravel.com on October 30, 2007, a couple weeks after I first came to Ecuador. I haven’t worked on it much since, because I’ve been working on the OneShore.com website and designed the QA Site offer. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted, though, and put the first real planning on (scratch) paper over the past few days. Creating the CuencaTravel.com presentation helped solidify the features.

I also spent the last couple days building a QA site for CuencaTravel.com at http://cuencatravel.qa-site.com/.

Because I did most of the setup work on qa-site.com for One Shore and the demo, it was pretty quick getting a base system set up (though of course longer than I thought.) Currently it has:

• A Subversion repository - including web access and remote commits with logins using htaccess
• A Trac project - mainly for the wiki, also using the same htaccess
• A ProjectPier project - for tasklists milestones, documents, and discussions.I’ll probably need something else for WBS and timeline. Probably just files.
• Wordpress-mu blogs - this is the first post

I also have a basic qa-site landing page with links to these four apps and a basic timeline table.

I’ve been working on features, requirements, and a sitemap in the trac wiki.

The idea of the sitemap is to recreate the site in the wiki with only a description of whats on each page and all the links. So you can navigate around in the wiki as if it were the site, only there won’t be any content or layout. I’ve got a good start on it, but it’s pretty disorganized.

I’ve got a basic (but fairly comprehensive) list of features. And only 1 requirement (which will probably be dropped) — Internationization.

In the trac wiki:
sitemap pages are prefixed with sitemap_
features are prefixed with features_
requirements are prefixed with req_

I’ll try to come up with a better system than that. I’ve wasted a lot of time reviewing project management apps, mostly Basecamp clones. I decided on ProjectPier because it’s among the best of the bunch and open source. Maybe it’s not wasted time, but I feel a pretty strong itch to make my own version and tie it in to QA site. I’ll try to avoid doing a feature list here.

I’ve also got a basic task list format based on todo.txt.

I’ll try to focus on CuencaTravel and develop a QA site for it at the same time, though I’ll try to keep things simple for Patricio, while at the same time teaching (and learning) good development and collaboration processes.

Welcome to Cuencatravel.qa-site.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!