Open Maturity Model – Let’s share Best Practices without auditors or certifications

Nothing to do with OSMM (open source maturity model). There is some discussion  going in  rails community for  Obie Fernandez post on idea of Rails Maturity Model.

I like the basic idea behind defining some sort of maturity model for rails but I don’t think RMM or anything like that should be modeled on CMM.

After spending  hours looking at views of many people regarding RMM in blogosphere, twitter and rails business google group , I concluded  that we might need some open system instead of something like RMM.

Following is an aggregation of views by various people who feel the need of a some model but dont like the idea of auditors, closed systems or certifications :

For time being , I am calling it Open Maturity Model and trying to draft some  basic principles and guidelines.

So, What is Open Maturity Model ?

For Developers

1. Roadmap for Rails developers to adopt best practices defined by the community.

2. Community giving newcomers a more-or-less official set of guidelines for how to produce quality work. Having some sort of guideline from a trustworthy source is becoming more difficult.

3. It will not take fun out of rails or kills innovation. It will just make the rails community stronger and will attract more people who are not yet sure about rails.

4. Judge yourself , instead of an expensive auditor judging you – if you are serious about doing quality work, open maturity model will give you a good point to start with.

5.  Let experienced developers share their experience on a common wiki in addition to blog posts about their experiences all on their own.

For Clients

1. A no nonsense, no lingo system to help a prospective client to choose a ROR shop. Give them more than just testimonials , a blog post, or a portfolio. The intent is to establish a minimum standard of operational efficiency so that clients who hire based on it can be sure they aren’t dealing with complete idiots.

2. Let’s share Business Knowledge – most development shops are busy coding and spend little to no effort on marketing or business development. Groups like rails business is a good start in this direction.

For Process

1. XP , SCRUM or whatever. One size doesnt fit all. At Vinsol, we follow a process which has evolved after lot of not-so-successful iterations. It works for us and we want to improve and share it with community. But we don’t want to call our process or anybody else’s practice “The Rails Way”. Again , a community website  where companies can register and document the level of process they implement allowing for clients and other companies to provide feedback so they could get ranked.

2. Instead of wasting resources proving that we are level 4 or level 5 by an external auditor, lets just focus on why we are in the business – writing good quality code, having fun doing it and building awesome applications.

3. Continous improvement is very important for growth and survival of many rails companies with thousands of rails shops opening around the world.

Certifications

1. Replace open source projects with certification – open source can play the role of  certification.  Have you ever contributed or tried to contribute  to rails core ? or, show us an interesting/useful open source project you started, or point to bugs that you submitted.

Looking for ideas and suggestions.

Update :  Matthew Ford has started a rails manifesto document in github. Please add your best practices here – http://gist.github.com/65183