[geeklog-devel] Bugtracker (was: New GL default theme)

[Jeff Hare]

Hi All, 

I believe that there could be *some* level of discussion that might prove
helpful.  After all, anything that can help lighten the developer load and
ease their stress would be great for all.

BUG/ENHANCEMENT/PROJECT TRACKING
================================
Getting Mantis (or something similar) up and running is a great step in the
right direction, assuming that anyone could create/be granted a login to
report and query issues. That should help users of GL communicate their
needs to the developers or determine whether an upgrade contains what they
need.  It obviously helps GL developers set consumer expectations in a
realistic way as well.

  SUGGESTION:
  ===========
I'd like to see a way for plugin developers to be able to manage issues
related to their plug-ins using the same bug tracking system.  After all, as
a consumer, I think of GL as one system with many developers.  


SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE:
================================
Another discussion that could be had is with regard to which Software
Development Life Cycle makes the most sense for GL moving forward.  From
what I can tell GL has always used something more like the Waterfall life
cycle where we bundle as many features we believe we can safely develop and
test into release.  The benefits from that are that we have a packaged
release each year or so that people can download and install.  

The issues I see from a consumer standpoint is that I usually have to fix
new/outstanding bugs myself and then suffer merging through each upgrade, or
live with it for 8-14 months until the next release.  While we don't know
for sure, it could also be a barrier to new GL adoption since if it
something they need doesn't work out of the box, they pretty-much have to
fix it themselves or wait for the next release.

  SUGGESTION:
  ===========
An Agile process where we focus on developing/testing/releasing smaller
Feature sets & Fixes and have more frequent micro-releases that are
supported and well tested would allow people to upgrade continuously if they
wanted to, or only when they see a new feature or repairs they require.

I'd be much more happy as an admin to apply patch releases 4-8 times a year
if I knew I didn't have to do much besides add or overlay some code files
and run an upgrade script.  Today, it's a stressful process of comparing
file trees, remembering all the things I had to change over the past year
and determining whether those fixes are still needed or not, etc..

Another benefit of a more Agile process combined with Mantis would be that
the "consumer" expectations for each release are automatically lowered to
more realistic levels because releases are more frequent and much smaller in
scope.  Having a way to Ping / "Me too" an open issue would help developers
know which issues are hot.

All that said, I want to commend all the developers for devoting amazingly
huge amounts of their personal time on GL and hope these comments are taken
as a constructive straw-man for moving forward and easing some burdens, and
*not* a critique of today's process.  

Thanks for listening.
-Jeff Hare


-----Original Message-----
From: geeklog-devel-bounces at lists.geeklog.net
[mailto:geeklog-devel-bounces at lists.geeklog.net] On Behalf Of Dirk Haun
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2007 2:22 AM
To: geeklog-devel
Subject: Re: [geeklog-devel] Bugtracker (was: New GL default theme)

Heather Engineering wrote:

>But perhaps we should have a serious discussion about infrastructure  
>at this point?

About what exactly? All we need now is a bugtracker and we're back in
business.


>There have been issues with the CVS browser as well.

The CVS browser is the least of our worries. It is back at

  <http://project.geeklog.net/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi>

(I've announced that here a while ago). We used the one integrated in
GForge for a while and it was therefore down while there was still hope
that we would get GForge back "soon". But it's not a problem to set up a
separate one, which is what I did now.

bye, Dirk


-- 
http://www.geeklog.net/
http://geeklog.info/

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