LSD: Getting the Most Out of Your Investment in Drupal

No software solution (proprietary or commercial) will ever meet 100% of the current, let alone future, needs of it's largest users; in addition to customizing the look and feel to reflect their unique brand and needs, most organizations implement new and enhance existing functionality.

Many organizations are doing amazing things with the Drupal framework and innovating by breaking through prior limitations. However, there is limited knowledge sharing and discussion happening among the biggest Drupal users. Similar problems are often solved multiple times independently, and in incompatible ways. And since few of these large companies are vocal and active in the community, the expertise gained from solving these problems isn't making its way back into the software that all Drupal users rely on. To help solve these issues, Acquia created and launched an innovative strategic alliance, "Large Scale Drupal".

Large Scale Drupal is a consortium of Drupal users who meet regularly to discuss and collaborate on common problems. We provide a forum for these large organizations, listen to their needs, prioritize them as a group, and then figure out a proper way to address those needs through knowledge sharing, white papers, training and development. The intent is not to keep the outcome of these efforts within the group. We want to share what we learn with the specific intent of it becoming a contributed back to Drupal and the community.

The goal of these projects is to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration among members of the group and the community. The Large Scale Drupal members get the benefits of sharing their development costs with other members. They also get significantly better software through the input of a diverse range of participants, built by some of the most talented people in the community, which will last longer and provide longer-term value as a shared solution that will continue to be enhanced by the partnership and community. The community benefits by gaining new contributions to Drupal, and an influx of expert talent into the Drupal contributor pool. Both the contributions of these companies, and the expertise that they bring to the table will help Drupal remain a long-term viable project.

In this talk, I’ll give a high level overview of the Large Scale Drupal Strategic Alliance, the types of problems we are solving, how we do our work through partners (vendors and services companies that are active contributors in the community) funneling money back into the community, and present a business case for collaborative development. I’ll talk briefly about existing projects and goals and the success we’ve seen to date, as well as future initiatives and plans, and take questions from the audience at the end of the presentation.

Speaker(s): 
Track: 
Business and Strategy
Experience level: 
Beginner
Time slot: 
Thursday 14:15-15:15
Room: 
Barcelona

Comments

Will LSD be provided at the session, or are we expected to bring our own?

Also, will there be any mentions of the MDMA (More Drupal for Major Associations), PCP (PHP for Corporate Partners), or DMT (Drupal for Mega-Trusts) initiatives?

I think it will be interesting to see how we can organize the resources of these large companies to help the Drupal community. No doubt there are politics, but what is wrong with that if we advance the community as a whole?

Alex, I enjoyed talking with you about LSD at the NYC Drupal Camp and appreciate your sense of humor. All jokes aside, based on our conversation, I think you would agree that Large Scale Drupal is a very serious, innovative and exciting initiative that will do great things for Drupal and the community.

I know that you have an interest in BDD, and you mentioned the Doobie project (which, for the record, we had no part in naming). This brings up a great example of how Drupal is benefitting from the LSD program. Through Large Scale Drupal, Capgemini - a global leader in consulting and technology - has generously donated a team of resources (3 developers, an architect, a pm) to work full time on Drupal for the benefit of, and under the Direction of the community.

They are currently working on Behavior-driven development (BDD) under the direction of Melissa Anderson (eliza411) and others for the next few months creating tests for Drupal.org to support our migration to Drupal 7 and ensure all that goes smoothly. Any Drupal site can leverage the comprehensive suite of automated tests they are writing, and they will soon start work on a Drupal extension for Behat so that others in the community can easily adopt BDD with minimal effort. They’ll demo their work shortly after DrupalCon and from what I’ve seen so far, it is very exciting and impressive.

Drupal’s strong unit testing has been a huge asset for the platform and is one of the primary reasons sites like Examiner.com were able to launch a top 100 site on Drupal 7, six months before it’s official release! Solid testing leads to a very stable product. Drupal now has comprehensive functional testing - BDD is the next logical step for the community to enhance our automated testing capabilities. This will be a very powerful asset for the platform.

This is just one of the exciting projects LSD is sponsoring or working on to improve the platform for all users. I hope that you’ll attend my talk to learn more about our efforts and how our members and sponsors are driving great improvements to the platform for the benefit of everyone.

See you in Munich!

Hi Michael,

Would you mind converting your presentation to PDF too, for those of us who don't use iWork?

Cheers,

Velimir

the file was larger then this drupalcon site allows; they are available as a pdf via google docs: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B5NGeES0zlvXVTlOczFxbi1PZ2s