If you are looking for the newest podcast on ZIMS testing, scroll down to the post below...It’s -9°F (-22° C) in Minneapolis, a good time for bipedal primates in the family Hominidae to huddle in a warm cave and develop software.
This week marks a transition between ZIMS Sprint 1 (institution contact information) and Sprint 2 (taxonomy ). (What’s a sprint again?).
Sprint 1 is in the final testing/bug fixing cycle as planned. That phase lasts until 2 January. Each sprint has a two-week planning phase, and this week marks the beginning of sprint 2 planning. Both sprint 1 and sprint 2 are the simplest parts of ZIMS.
We begin sprint 2 planning with a gathering of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). These are experts from the ISIS Global Community whose inside knowledge of the daily aquarium and zoo world will guide the “business” (meaning "user") side of ZIMS development. SMEs have always been the backbone of ZIMS development and they remain so.
This week marks another transition. Over the last eight months ISIS has reconfigured the ZIMS development process, redesigned the way ZIMS screens look and revamped the structure of the database. This week marks the first time that some members of the ISIS community start to see the details of that work, including some very cool doo-dads and widgets (like “drag and drop”) created by Wenlei Fang that will help speed up a lot of basic data entry in ZIMS.
The SMEs in Minneapolis this week are:
Duncan Bolton, Birdworld, Farnham, Curator
Jason Crichton, South Carolina, Aquarium Biologist
Lynn McDuffie, Disney, Registrar
Adrienne Miller, ISIS, Registrar
Tracy Clippinger, San Diego, Veterinarian
Rachel Thompson, ISIS, Veterinarian
Becky Bryning, San Diego, IT
Jon Ballou, National, Population Mgmt.
Tim Carpenter, Seattle Aquarium Biologist
Laurie Bingaman Lackey, ISIS, Population Mgmt.
As you can tell from the happy picture at right, Sprint 1 enters testing today. (
The chart above is part of a weekly progress report prepared by Shalini Jain, a ZIMS 
