Recently has been announced the public availability of the new Openbravo Forge. The Openbravo Forge is the new home for the projects Openbravo ERP and Openbravo POS and it is also the place we provide to all collaborators to register their projects related to Openbravo products, like for example localizations, translations and others.

In the Openbravo Forge you will be able to create a new project with all the services a modern forge provides: forums, code repository, bug tracker, file releases section, wiki, etc. And you will have more visibility to all the Openbravo community because your project will be hosted in the same place with Openbravo ERP and Openbravo POS and sharing the same services.

Focusing on Openbravo POS, if you want to contribute there are a lot of ideas for new projects that we will be glad to host in the Openbravo Forge:

• New translation packages. Openbravo POS has been translated to several languages. Now we asked to all translators to move to the new Openbravo Forge and if you plan to start a new translation package I would suggest you to do the same. With the Openbravo Forge, translators have more autonomy and more flexibility to develop translations, to collaborate with more people in the code repository, discuss the development in the project forums, release translation packages when translations are finished, etc. We already moved the Spanish traslation package to the new forge and this project can be the model for other new translations packages hosted in the Openbravo Forge.
  
• New localization editions. In some countries, due to special market requirements and local laws, some modifications have to be included in the core source code to adapt Openbravo POS to these local markets. Now with the Openbravo Forge all localizations will be in the same place and you do not have to look further. We also already asked to the owners of localizations of Openbravo POS we know to move to the Openbravo Forge and there is already one localization project created: The Openbravo POS Swedish Edition (Thanks Ben).
  
• New functionalities. Depending on market requirements and customer necessities, developers need to include in Openbravo POS new features and functionalities that can be useful for other users of Openbravo POS. With the Openbravo Forge you can search all projects in the Openbravo POS category with the functionality you need. And if you want to collaborate there is already a document with Community project ideas around Openbravo POS with very interesting new functionalities and features.
  

You are invited to visit the Openbravo Forge and if you need assistance using it or you want to give us your feedback you can write a message in the Forge support forum.

Next 1st and 2nd of April I'm going to be attending in the in the Swiss Open Source Software Conference in Bern.

On 2nd of April there are two sessions on Openbravo ERP in the conference business track:

• 13:30 Openbravo ERP: Open Source ERP for professional business by Walter Demichiel, Director of DW-Net.
  
• 14.30 Building an open source community: the Openbravo experience by Jordi Mas from Openbravo.

Walter Demichiel is the Direktor DW-Net, a partner of Openbravo. He will focus his talk in Openbravo as a professional solution for business.

I will be focusing my talk on Openbravo community, specially in the latest initiatives that we have been developing and how you can contribute to the Openbravo ecosystem.

A common criticism of Open Source software vendors (most often made by our proprietary brethren) is that Open Source vendors are founded by engineers and technologists who do not understand commercial business, and the importance of the sales and marketing functions. I will let that generalization stand for now (of course, commercial success requires a proper balance across the disciplines!), and focus my first series of posts on the "flip side", namely:

Hello everybody!

Openbravo ERP & POS projects have a new home:

• Openbravo ERP is located at http://forge.openbravo.com/projects/openbravoerp
• Openbravo POS is located at http://forge.openbravo.com/projects/openbravopos
  

We have completed the users and forum posts migration that we have previously announced, all the previous forum activity has been migrated to the new Openbravo Forge

The new home includes a complete new forum system with many new features. If you have question regarding the usage of the new Forge, please use the public support forum for Openbravo Forge.

Last months, Openbravo‘s QA team developed a set of scripts using Selenium. With Selenium, we were able to automate our standard Smoke Test.

About Selenium

After surveying the cloud of automation tools, we choose Selenium for a number of reasons:

It allows to run on many operating systems. Other tools like market’s leader HP Quick Test or IBM Rational Robot work in Windows only.

It allows to use either Mozilla Firefox (versions 2 and 3) or Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 6). Other tools like Watir and Watij work with IE only (although Watir has
Firewatir, a mechanism to drive Firefox).

Scripts can be developed in Java, and using JUnit as driver, you can easly develop a framework using Eclipse Classic IDE.

Last but not least, it’s open source software.

Do you like automation? Try it!

Now the whole community can access the automation code branches for 2.3x and 2.40 stable branches. A tag for testing 2.40 community edition is also available, and the current development Main is available as well. For more information you can visit the Project Page at our Forge.
If you want to know more about the process, you may check Automation main page in our wiki. There are also a lot of useful pages grouped in an Automation Category.

If you are interested in running the scripts, you may check this wiki page. We encourage you to use automation to check stability of any Openbravo ERP version you have.

About Automated Software Testing

A key process for any QA process is reliable automation, so virtually a continuous quality assurance cycle is inserted to find any stability issue on early stages. In Openbravo’s QA team, this is performed with a combination of Java, Selenium and Ant. Java and Selenium are used for user interface web-based functional testing. Other Java processes execute queries to the database to ensure correct non UI observable results. And by using Ant, all this processes are linked among them as well as added to daily build tasks.

The most important aspect of UI based automation is the high volatility of the resultant scripts. Simple changes that real users may not notice, like changes in button HTML identifiers, can broke an automated test. Also, functional changes are part of the normal development, like a new requirement of adding a new mandatory field on a form.

A failed script execution on a daily build, fires a maintenance tasks for automated scripts. Since new functionalities are not included on automation, only changes to current functionality or unexpected behavior can affect Smoke Test. In the latter case, a bug should be fed. If the change is because a planned modification, both online documentation and automated scripts are updated and the Smoke Test is run again.

Next Steps

This version of the scripts are somewhat basic regarding dynamic execution. That means that test cases must be executed from first to last, since previous generated data is a precondition. For example, you may note that create a Sales Order requires to have a specific Customer, as well as a specific Product. Dynamic scripts are under development right now, which will allow to decouple modules to fit any given data.
We are currently enlarging the scope of automation for trunk version. Contributors are welcomed. If you have some knowledge on QA processes, automation and programming skills, contact us at automation _at_ openbravo _dot_ com
Additionally, you may want to develop your own scripts to verify custom code. We will gladly help you if you contact us at our Automation forum at the Forge.

As a brief introduction of myself I am responsible for the financial and localization capability of Openbravo ERP. I have worked in the ERP industry for 11 years as Director of Product Management for one of the main players in the proprietary ERP market.
Moving to Openbravo is an extremely exciting opportunity for me as I am a strong believer in the "distributed" localization model. Quite simply I lost faith in the ability of the large proproprietary solutions to support local market needs with centralized development in a timely and efficient manner.
Openbravo, as an open source solution, really is the ultimate distributed model and I am looking forward to working with the Openbravo community to make it a success for all of us.
A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by the Open Source ERP Guru on "Openbravo ERP Localization" the results of which you can find published here:
http://opensourceerpguru.com/2009/03/19/openbravo-erp-localization/
The key message that I wanted to convey was our belief here at Openbravo that we have the ability to create a "localization ecosystem" that allows all members of that ecosystem to thrive.
A fundamental technical component that we have recently delivered on Openbravo ERP 2.50 (currently in Beta) is the concept of modularity.
The localization development team have been playing with modularity themselves over the last month or so, partly in order to test it, but really to prove to ourselves that it really does make a difference, both in the ease of development and the speed of deployment. We set ourselves the challenge of creating the first localization "pack" for Spain. Last week the guys demonstrated the results of their efforts to me and it is genuinely very impressive! Not just "cool", but really something that gets your mind racing through all the possible applications and uses. They opened up a "bare" demo version of Openbravo (English language, no chart of accounts) and picked the "Spanish Localization Pack" from a list of modules that were listed as available for download by the Openbravo application. After a couple of minutes it was "hey presto" and we had a localized version of Openbravo, including language, chart of accounts, alerts, tax rates, etc.
It was very clear to me that this is going to make our lives a lot easier in delivering and supporting add-ons, but (getting back to the Open Source ERP Guru) the real impact this will have is on that ecosystem I was refering to.
With the combination of modularity on Openbravo 2.50 and the new Openbravo Forge there is significant potential for localizers to add value to the core Openbravo features in a way that has a straightforward ROI associated with it.
Selecting Openbravo modularity as the development framework and the forge as the licensing, distribution and support network combines into an extremely efficient delivery mechanism; removing a significant amount of cost from the developer and at the same time providing enhanced revenue opportunities throughout the ecosystem.
As I told the Open Source ERP Guru “Modularity..makes a huge difference both to the ease with which localization can be added in by a customer, the ease by which a partner can develop a module add-on and the ease by which a new module can enhance functionality.. a fourth dimension (to modularity) is … from the partners’ prospective, the potential for modularity to provide an enhanced revenue stream from the provision of those localization packs. With 2.50 we have delivered the technical platform for modularity and we are using that platform ourselves to deliver modules and localizations ourselves already.”
For those of you attending the Openbravo Word Conference we will be showing a demonstration of the use of modularity in delivering localization capability during my Localization session on Sunday afternoon.

The Openbravo migration to the new Forge will occur Saturday 28th of March starting at 7.00am GMT+1 and it expecting to be completed by 14.00 GMT+1. During this period of time it will not be possible to create new forum messages in the Openbravo ERP & POS forums. The objective of this process is to migrate all the forum posts from SourceForge to the new Forge.

The people working on the migration will be using the Openbravo IRC as communication channel. That is as you know:

Server: irc.freenode.net
Channel name: #openbravo

You are more details in out Wiki about Openbravo chat channels.

On account synchronization

In case that your SourceForge username does not match with your Openbravo Single Sign on username, your previous activity in SourceForge will not be preserved. This is not desirable since you will loose all the recognition of the activity that you have previously generated and its ownership. For example, in my case my user at SourceForge is jordimash but in our Single Sign On system is just jordimas. I'm interested in having my previous activity generated as jordimash mapped to my new Single Sign On user jordimas. If you are in this case, write your details in our Migration Account List and we will do the mapping for your account

Openbravo ERP core project tool map

• Project home page -> Openbravo ERP project at Openbravo Forge
• Project News -> Openbravo ERP project news (using the new Forge, active after the migration)
  
• Wiki -> Openbravo Wiki
• Forums -> Openbravo ERP forums in the Openbravo Forge (using the new Forge, active after the migration)
  
• Downloads -> SourceForge downloads
• Mailing lists -> SourceForge mailing lists
• Source Control System -> Openbravo Code (Mercurial repository)
• Bug tracking system -> Openbravo Issues
  

Openbravo POS core project tool map

• Project home page -> Openbravo POS project at Openbravo Forge
• Project News -> Openbravo POS project news (using the new Forge, active after the migration)
• Wiki -> Openbravo Wiki
• Forums -> Openbravo POS forums in the Openbravo Forge (active after the migration)
• Downloads -> SourceForge downloads
  
• Source Control System -> Openbravo Dev (Subversion repository)
  
• Bug tracking system -> Openbravo Issues

If you want to see the new forums, have a look to the Support forum for example. Feel free to post here any question that you have.

As I commented recently this Saturday we are going to migrate the Openbravo POS and ERP projects to the new and shiny Openbravo Forge. This means that starting this Saturday 28th of March, Openbravo community is going to use the forums provided by the platform.

Having new forums has been a long time requested feature by our community and we are very happy to be able to answer.

Let me highlight some of the new features that the forums have compared to the ones used until now in SourceForge:

· HTML messages with a full WYIWYG editor. This includes obviously the possibility to use formatted text, images and links. A new world compared to the old plain regular text
· Attachments. Now it is possible to attach files to messages, ranging from logs to screenshots. This is handy when you need help debugging problems or users want to share results.
· Sticky messages. This is really useful for forums that want to highlight a new message to all the newcomers. For example, a FAQ built from the activity of the message, a very hot issue of the week, a reminder to all participants, etc.
· Google indexing. As you have noticed Google does not index SourceForge content. This is specially bad for the forums because it is a very important source of knowledge for Openbravo ERP and POS projects. With the new Openbravo Forge, all the content is indexed by Google, what makes one of our more important knowledge assets fully available to everyone easing the search and resolution of Openbravo related issues.

If you want to see the new forums, have a look to the Support forum for example. Feel free to post here any question that you have.

Tomorrow I will blog about the detailed migration schedule for the Openbravo POS and ERP projects that is taking place this Saturday to 28th of March.

Tomorrow Paolo Juvara and I will bet at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco, CA.

OSBC is the premier strategy event for the open source industry. It was founded in 2003 by Matt Asay, who is an Openbravo advisor. Paolo and I plan to meet several of our peers to exchange ideas and best practices.

Additionally, I will participate in a panel to discuss the nuances of community building. The panel will be moderated by Stormy Peters, Executive Director and the Gnome Foundation.

Key ideas I will voice include:

• The importance for all the company to become "community" and embrace community processes and communication channels
• The importance to lead and set example if you want others to follow
• The importance of recognition and meritocracy
• The importance to invest in tools to lower collaboration barriers

I bet you recognize some of the initiatives we are taking in Openbravo to make the above statements a reality.

I will share my learnings after the conference in a follow-on post.