TheHat is a Ruby based workflow task coordination system. You can use it to coordinate things like release cycles, deployment procedures, and pretty much anything where you have to make a bunch of things happen in a particular order.
TheHat aims at a very precise niche in the "workflow" world - precise enough that it "workflow" applies only in the most generic sense of the word: Its goal is primarily to drive a predefined directed graph of tasks through to completion by tracking and prompting work by teams of people and/or automated systems in near real time.
You can use TheHat to drive teams and processes through things like:
- Complex Methods of Procedure (MOPs) including
- Software upgrades
- Network reconfigurations
- Configuration changes
- etc
- Long running "procedures" like
- Software development cycles
- Billing cycles
- Technical sales procedures
Procedures codified as TheHat workflows become active entities - running programs. In a sense your procedures manage themselves. It can alleviate quite a lot of procedural drudgery and potential for mishaps that drudgery can lead to.
Documentation is in the wiki:
- Introduction
- Sample Session
- Graph Legend
- Quickstart
- Configuration
- Workflows
- Commands
- Engine API
- History
If you need help:
- Change requests etc
- freenode channel: #thehat