ReadySET JotSpot

A few months ago, I came across ReadySET, a collection of XHTML document templates for software engineering processes. ReadySET has templates for things like project plans, use cases, QA test plans, design documents, status reports and release notes. The collection is structured such that you basically end up with a template for an entire engineering intranet.

When I first came across ReadySET, I immediately thought of four technology improvements that would make it even more useful:

• the structure of each document, once customized, could be fixed and editing was only possible on content.
• where document templates (or even sections within a document) are to be instantiated multiple times (e.g. a test plan or status report) there be a mechanism to do so other than merely making a copies of the template file or copy-pasting the section multiple times.
• some documents could provide dynamic summaries by pulling information out of other documents.
• documents could pull information out of other systems such as bug-tracking.

My thinking at the time was some kind of custom wiki-like application that served up the ReadySET documents wiki-style with the additional functionality outlined above.

Now I'm thinking the idea might be perfect for JotSpot. I still haven't found the time to dig deep into the beta but it might be a great project to try.