HEMP Update and UBPL

[David E Jones <de...@me.com>]

I have just finished the first revision of the "HEMP Best (and Worst)  
Practices" book, and an updated revision of the "HEMP light" book. I  
appreciate the feedback I've received (especially from Ruth Hoffman)  
on the HEMP light book that has lead to improvements in this revision.  
I call these "books" but they are really short documents, about 20  
pages each, and should be easily digestible in about an hour each.

These books contain the concepts that I plan to use to drive the  
Universal Business Process Library (UBPL) effort, and the various  
efforts that have been discussed that can be based on it. The most  
important aspect of this, to me anyway, is to start doing more  
collaboration on requirements and designs in addition to the current  
successful collaboration on implementation.

Along with being helpful for this part of the OFBiz effort, the HEMP  
books are primarily meant to be guidelines for service providers or  
end-user internal groups, and are designed to work especially well  
with something that is readily customizable like Apache OFBiz. I've  
been using some of these things for a LONG time, others I only started  
using within the last couple of years, and all of them have been  
extremely helpful to better meet end-user expectations and create  
systems that are a good match for the organizations that use them. Now  
that my little plug is out of the way... ;)

The HEMP books are available here:

http://www.dejc.com/home/HEMP.html

The OFBiz UBPL Index is here:

http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBREQDES/Universal+Business+Process+Library+Index

Now that these two HEMP books are done (or "initially complete") I'm  
planning to work more on the UBPL stories, and then on overlap/gap  
analysis, screen outlines and other design artifacts that are based on  
them to document how many things are currently done in OFBiz, and also  
start driving some new specialpurpose applications that more directly  
address some of the business processes documented in UBPL.

For anyone that would like to get involved, I would more than  
appreciate the help! The one thing that I would ask is that you read  
the 2 HEMP books, the UBPL Introduction document, and the existing  
UBPL stories. The overall time for doing that should be around 4  
hours. I know that is a bit to ask, but doing so should get you to a  
point where you have a good idea about where this is going, what has  
been done, and what still needs to be (and can be!) done.

-David