Draft Blog Post

Observing a PANDA in its natural habitat

We've been developing the PANDA project using agile practices. One of the keys to agile development is stakeholder involvement: you can only build the right software if you are in close contact to people who need the software and are using it actively. Because of this, we've been eager to reach the point where the application was ready to offer to reporters in working newsrooms. With our recent beta release, we've been able to learn a lot about what works according to plan, where we might need to make some adjustments, and what features we hadn't even considered which may now move towards the front of the development pipeline.

At the NICAR conference in St. Louis, we helped almost two dozen PANDA servers enter the world in less than an hour. We took this as a good sign that we'd succeeded at making PANDA easy to install. These early users flushed out a couple of small but annoying bugs which were promptly fixed, although we have not yet released an update. I don't know if it is because of this or because of other circumstances, but we haven't heard much else from the field. We should have an easy-to-run upgrade process and an updated installer in the next week or two. In the meantime, we can help people with existing PANDA setups get past these bugs: just drop a line to our user mailing list.

While we're looking to learning more from people who've installed PANDA, we've learned quite a bit from the Chicago Tribune's roll out of the application. We had a series of meetings with editors and other staff to show them how to use the application. In the course of demonstrating and discussing PANDA, we've updated our features list. The PANDA board will meet in-person soon to for an intensive session of prioritizing features. If you're using PANDA already, we would love to hear more from you to help us focus development for the remaining months of our grant. You can use the comments here, or feel free to join us on the user mailing list.