Before telling the story, I would like to thank Intland CEO Mr.Koppany and Y.S and Jeffery of Esast for providing me a special license on using codeBeamer to track house construction on my new coming home which is a whole new community. It's a good opportunity for testing CB in different domain, too.

I have been using CodeBeamer for years. About my personal background, I am a software team manager. I am using CodeBeamer to manage team's daily works in order to keep all developing works on the track. From software developing perspective, CodeBeamer has been a good handy and helpful tool to assist us in many ways.

Let us get back to the topic of this article. In the end of 2007, I ordered a new house for my family. In over crowded Taiwan, most people live in condos or apartments. Those crowded units are usually built and designed through construction companies and sold through real estate agencies. The house interior designs or exterior designs normally are fixed and unable to be changed no matter you like it or not. My new purchased house is independent unit with front and back yards which is much rare in northern part of Taiwan. Moreover, the construction company allows us to be able to change exterior and interior designs. Such customization flexibility does attract many people for this new game rule that they believe they can form a community and truly build a dream house designed as their wish.

However, this new pattern to build the house is a new attempting for the construction company and constructors. Many change requests (and many of them are unique for one house only) are raised by house owners since day one. Unlike the past, constructors only need to know one design and replicate to other units without any modification or different requests. For this kind of community, designs and real buildings have slight differences. Or, designs may have technical difficulties which are not aware of in the beginning. So, conflicts and complains occur between house owners and construction company due to project delays, mismatch designs, etc. in other construction projects.

The construction company has met the following problems:

1. Project delay, serious delay. Many projects are kept delayed and do not have estimated time frame. The first project (my house is the 4th project) has been delayed for 3 years.
2. Related documents are never under good version control. The construction company needs to provide many documents to us. However, after many times of revision, they are not able to keep good track of version. So, lousy documents and debug revisions are kept on generated.
3. Losing Track of issues. There is no place to record issues. So, many issues have been "automatically ignored".
4. Tons of email looping. Many people still prefer to use email as the primary communication tool. The construction company may keep on receiving the same issues from each independent house owner, wasting time for replying one by one.

(Does all these issues similar to software developing projects?)

In order to reduce all these redundant works and keep speeding up house construction, some projects' house owners grouped and discussed through discussion forum for change requests and track construction progress. Most of them use Yahoo family (tw.club.yahoo.com), which is a forum provided by Yahoo Taiwan. In the beginning, it was good to use because it is simple and easy for everyone to work on it. However, for lacking of traceability, the forum may be filled with many replies for a single topic (see the picture). Old articles may be discarded by system because Yahoo has capacity limits.

Seeing enough fails on previous projects, I considered on how to prevent this lousy project control from user side. Initially, I used PHPBB as the major discussion forum that all my future neighbors can get together and exchange information there. However, with more and more articles, it became difficult to track just like Yahoo system. The further annoying situation is that many PHPBB spider robots create many dummy user ids and dummy articles. Images or documents (such as some PDF and Word documents) are not able to be attached to their related article or topic. So, the free PHPBB solution reached its dead end due to its functionality is not able to support our demands.

I turned to codeBeamer (CB) to see if it fits on this special domain. From our current projects' symptoms, CB should be fit to our case. So, I set up the collaboration portal with CB version 4.2, and summarized all issues needed to be tracked. Then let my future neighbors can view the status when he/she logs in the portal. After a period of time, I exported all tracking issues on CB to Excel report and showed it to my neighbors during our first meeting. The benefits of CB was addressed once. Status report is easily to be generated and available for everybody thereafter.

After the first meeting, I am ambitious to introduce more functions to other neighbors. However, after more times of face-to-face meeting with my future neighbors, it made me realized that I was hitting the problems which I had never encountered in my software team. I encountered some difficulties of promoting this system because my future neighbors are not in IT background and their English capabilities are various. Some of them work for government agency, some of them work in sales domain, some of them are teachers, and some of them are retired, etc. So, everyone's English capability and IT system knowledge are varied. For some, even to summarize an issue is also difficult.

The difficulties are:

1. Localization Issue. Lack of local language interface.
2. IT Operation Issue. Many members are not used to work on IT system, and working on the portal may be too complex for them.
3. Work Style Issue. Many of my future neighbors don't have concept to work under project base. So, many issues are raised without priorities and categories.

In order to keep good tracking, here is what I am doing under current situation to overcome or by pass the difficulties:

1. Localization issue. I have change some default English language texts into Traditional Chinese to help most people to read it without problems. However, I am not able to customize the tabs on the top of CB through CB's UI. Many people still have issues to operate it because they have language barriers. Therefore, I revised the login.jsp, letting system jumps to the CB project's Wiki directly to reduce the language barrier.
2. IT Operation Issue. Some members even don't know how to register a system due to their IT and English abilities. The good news is these members still know how to send and receive e-mails. So, I helped them to register their accounts on CB first and configured the system to let them receive e-mail notifications for information update. Under this case, although they are not able to actively report or write any comment to the system directly, they can still passively receive information for how are all projects going and view all tracking issues on CB.
3. Work Style Issue. Each tracker item has fields for categories and priorities. Just make them the required fields, then each issue can be managed in project base.

Although there are above disadvantages of using CodeBeamer, they are minor from my point of view. By using CB, we gain more benefits:

1. All members have access to documents directly without any security leak issues. Because there are personal information inside the documents, it is safe to share information on CB with document version history and security control.
2. CB can automatically notify changes to the members. So, even team members are not familiar with the system, they can still get information by e-mail in time
3. CB's report feature makes the generation of agenda list for meeting easy and clear.
4. Issues are tracked well (which is CB's best feature).

The community construction project is just in the beginning stage, so, I am hoping this tool can help our project schedule and all issue tracking through to the good result. I am still working on training material for all neighbors because they are not software technical related. I will update more info once material is ready and deployed.