AgilityFeat is building a tool to help non profits raise money and to help you learn Agile Engineering practices! If you 
attended the ADP West conference this year in Las Vegas, then you may have already heard about what we’re doing.
In cooperation with Bob Payne of Lithespeed and Kent McDonald of Beyond Requirements, we are building a website to allow non profits to create wishlists of items that their clients need, and then raise money towards those specific goals.
The idea was presented to us by Ravi Respeto of the Albemarle Housing Improvement Program (AHIPVA.org), and they will be the beta users of the system. AHIP helps distressed families in Central Virginia with necessary home repairs so that they can stay in their homes. They have a waiting list of many families who need their help, and so anything that helps them raise more funds for the projects will also help each of those families.
AgilityFeat’s UX lead Mariana Lopez, and our graphic designer Daniel Phillips have created a design for the site so that it can be built to be used by many charities other than just AHIP. Here’s a sneak peek of the design for the home page.
For each project, AHIP can list details about the families and photos, as well as the specific items they need and the prices for them. Donors can make donations towards the goal or completely check off items from the list by donating the full amount.
AHIP (and other charities using Wishlisting.org) will then be able to upload photos after the fact to keep in touch with donors and let them know how the project went.
We started building the Wishlisting project at ADP West, and we made good progress on the technical infrastructure. We’ve got Ruby on Rails, Cucumber, and Continuous Integration with Jenkins in place. Since the conference I’ve been setting up a Continuous Deployment infrastructure for the project as well as continuing the development.
We also expect to run similar labs at other upcoming conferences this year. The goal of the labs at the conferences will be twofold: 1) make progress on the actual functionality, and 2) help conference attendees apply the agile engineering techniques they are learning at the conference on a real world project.
I’ll continue to update you on the progress of this project via this blog, and you can also see the current progress of deployed code by visiting http://www.wishlisting.org/ There’s not much to see yet, but that will be changing over the coming months!
