eCollaboration: Exercise 1

Bringing Ruby to IGLB

InterGlobalLucreBanc, a multinational financial institution, is suffering through a hiring freeze right now. That's unfortunate, because just before the freeze they had been planning to greatly expand their presence on the web. IGLB wants to distinguish themselves from other institutions by offering portals covering investment advice of various kinds with heavy participation by customers and potential customers. Because the vision is very much in the Web 2.0 mold, the plan was to adopt the same software development tools used by many 21st century startups: Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails has several advantages. It's great for quick prototyping and it leads to Ajax-y, user-friendly web sites. But here's the problem: None of the dozens of software engineers in IGLB's farflung empire have any experience with it. Since no new programmers can be hired, it was decided to give existing staff some time to learn Rails on their own in a mutually supportive learning environment.

Fortunately, the software developers in the company are accustomed to collaboration. Several years ago IGLB adopted eXtreme Programming as a methodology so working together has become baked into the job.

The desired outcome is that 100 experienced software engineers will become proficient enough at Ruby on Rails to be able to begin developing new resources within a month. Your job is to work through the process and design a collaborative learning environment in which this can happen.