[vtp-dev] Voice Tools Project Development Call Minutes: June 28, 2005

[Brent D Metz <bdmetz@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Hope I got everyone's name right. If I didn't please drop
me a note and let me know.

Eclipse Voice Tools Development Call Minutes
 
June 28, 2005, 11am EST
 
Attendees:
Ross Yakulis, Avaya
Jason Tepper, Audium
Jeff Fried, Empirix
Tumi Chen, Empirix
Frederic Gloppe, HP
Brent Metz, IBM
Jeff Kobal, IBM
Frank Sauer, IBM
Ian Sutherland, Oracle
Brian Marquette, Sandcherry
Harry Chang, SBC
Jayant Thomas, SBC
Michael Greenawalt, TellMe
Michael ???, VoiceObjects
Derek Barnes, VoiceGenie
 

The call began with Brent Metz leading a discussion of the problems the
Voice Tools Project aims to address;
duplication in effort in industry, lack of common extension points between
tooling vendors,
and lack of a powerful set of open source tools.
 
Brent then proceeded into a discussion of the Eclipse
Development Process. Callers were encouraged to
look at the Eclipse Development Process PDF on eclipse.org. Many concepts
such as the phases of development
and the means by which companies contribute code and resources to an Eclipse
project were discussed.
 
It was asked if it would be possible to take the existing
IBM contribution and create a project plan around
productizing that contribution. The response was that only releasing with
IBM's contribution could create the
perception of an 'IBM Toolkit' as opposed to a community effort. It was
stated by another caller that releasing
the existing contribution would be alright for an initial release.
 
It was noted that the existing contribution had not received
a lot of public feedback and that more feedback was
needed in order to know where to focus. Frederic from HP stated a willingness
to contribute to the project.
 
An interest in the development of graphical tools was
stated. It was also stated that tools to handle call path 
generation and other testing tools would be welcomed.
 
A summary of the state of the IBM contribution and its
feature sets was presented. It was asked whether or not the
existing contribution could handle debugging of an application. It was
stated that the contribution could, to the
extent that the underlying Eclipse and Web Tools editor functionality already
supported the plugging in of a set
of code to implement the Eclipse debugging APIs. VoiceXML Debugger functionality
was cited as something that would be
helpful to see in the Voice Tools Project.
 
Logging and Analysis tools were also proposed as good
tools to include in an initial release.
 
The 'chicken and egg' problem of building a project plan
based upon resources which may not be committed until a
plan is available was discussed. It was proposed that a list of features
be circulated to the vtp-dev mailing list
for each participant to 'vote' for the features they would like to see.
It was proposed that the list would then be 
prioritized and volunteers to develop portions that emerge as most wanted
would be solicited.
 
The call ended at 11:55am EST.

--
Brent D. Metz
Enterprise Voice Tools
bdmetz@xxxxxxxxxx
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible."
- Alan Kay