1. Welcome to itsme
Technical Development
Seminar
by the itsme tech team
© 2008 by Itsme S.r.l.
All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Itsme S.r.l.

2. Outline
The Dream Team
Where we are
The itsme architecture
Where we are going
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3. Who we are

4. The Dream Team
current work
reflects my
personal activity and
does not reflect
activity from cisco
Giovanni Marco
Martinelli Loregian
Michele Lorenzo
Tameni Bellini
Alessandro
Fabio
Morandi
Erculiani
Roberto Vincenzo
Guido Di Massa
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5. Where we are

6. Where We Are
Requirements Definition (for OS rel. 1.0)
Graphical ToolKit
Early Prototyping (Python)
Linux Distribution
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7. Requirement Definitions
Start from “Interaction Design
Manual” and indentify requirements
for development activity
Define what the system has to do
Reduce the scope to the first OS
release
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8. Graphical Toolkit
Technical:
• Custom widgets
• Interface skinning
• Product roadmap
Strategic
• Licensing
• Community
But: we try to be loosely coupled
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9. itsme Licensing vs. Qt
Our possible Licensing Policy:
• Closed for GUI (novel interaction modalities)
• Open for the data management
Nokia releases QT 4.5 as LGPL:
• Add the missing flexibility
(as much as GTk+)
• Still available as commercial license if we
will need it
• LGPL should boost the community
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10. Early Prototyping
Validate the architecture:
• Layering
• Variability (experiment options)
Validate the information flow:
• Bottlenecks & communication
channels
• Initial performance assessment
A vehicle to work with the
Interaction Design team
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11. A few words on our
Linux distribution
www.sabayon.org

12. What is Sabayon
Open Source international project:
www.sabayon.org
Based on Gentoo GNU/Linux ~arch
Perfect match of scalability, ease of use and
management
Entropy Infrastructure
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13. How it works
Sabayon is community-driven
Users rule
The best and most expert users are part of the
development process
Organized in teams: Core team, Artwork team,
Localisation team, Testing team, Packaging team
Give back, according to collected resources
 Benevolent dictatorship
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14. Phylosophy and Strategy
 KISS, Keep It Sustainable Stupid!
 “Silk cocoon” strategy
 “Don't be evil” (Google)
 We love challenges
Dietro ad ogni successo c'è un pazzo che ci ha creduto
quando gli altri scuotevano la testa
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15. Why Sabayon
Why the name?
Feminine
Scalable in terms of features, context of use, and
customization
 OOTB “Out Of The Box”
Sabayon is what people want
Innovative features
Why not Ubuntu?
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16. Worldwide
NLnet Foundation
Havana University and
Cuban government
(project Nova Linux)
Universities of Brescia
and Milano-Bicocca
40.000 users
200.000 Web visitors
per month
Itsme, of course
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17. How We Work
A few essential informations

18. The Cathedral or The Bazaar?
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19. Development Methodology
Short(en) iterations and early
integrations
Initial experiments with current
prototyping activity
Development Iterations
Current Proto Ref
TO BE DEFINED
Prototype Early June
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20. Team Cooperation
Local & Remote Coordination?
• Few on site people and some remote
people
• Typical forum/chat/mail
• Weekly report & periodic check points
Involve a development community
(soon)
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21. Development Environment
From Python (prototype) to C++
• Depends on modules
• Mix flexibility vs openness vs
performance
To evaluate the set of libraries we will
depend on (e.g., Kde)
To evaluate usage of tools to support
some of test phases (gperf, purify)
A system test strategy to be defined
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22. How we came so far
Metaphor
Interaction
Interface
Front end
Back end
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23. Documentation Flow
Tech Requirements
System Architecture
Design Documentations
API documentations
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24. The itsme architecture

25. Design rationale
Logical (and possibly physical)
independence between UI and
meta/data management
• With a back end that is not dependent
on the metaphor of stories and venues
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29. Where we are going

30. Planning: Global Timeline
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31. Major Deadlines
Nov 2009: Start Final Integration
and System Test Phase
Jan 2010: internal alpha testing,
Complete OS System but only for
itsme team
April 2010: itsme os released to
beta users (i.e. external people,
selected)
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32. Rough Resource Planning
(The mythical Man Month)
Front End Development: 30 MM
• Front end components (presentation / logic)
• Window manager and custom widgets
• System settings
Back End Development: 20-25 MM
• Synchronization/plugin y
arl ate
Em i
est
• Metadata management
• Persistence and storage management
Migration Support System: 16-20 MM
• Data migration and Application support
y
arl ate
• Advanced application support (+10 MM) Em i
est
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33. 1. Architecture & Prototype refinement
Details in deep requirements with
ID team
Refine user interactions
Explore architetural variations
Back end: from stub to prototype
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34. 2. Code Development
Software from prototype to
production:
• Rewrite internal modules whenever
necessary
• Unit testing
Early integration steps
Perfomance study
System configurations etc.
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35. 3. Final Integration
All modules come together with
feature freeze
System Testing
• A defined set of test to be applied (end
to end operations)
Memory Testing (à la purify)
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36. 4. Alpha Testing
Complete Operating System
available for itsme team
• (not only developers)
Work on final laptop (fix hardware
specific issues)
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37. itsme 1.0 April 2010
Beta release
Selected set of
users
• outside our
community)
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