2012/4/14 Vincent Massol <[email protected]>: > Well I'm fine with both too but I really think you'll get more extensive > result from asking on this thread: > * you'll get the sum of our knowledge. There isn't a single person who knows > it all here. We all have some knowledge of some part of XWiki and we don't > always agree! (which is very fine) > * this interaction will be archived and searchable in the future so people > won't just see the result but the whole interaction and the various answers > from different people > > So I'm all for doing it here :)
Well, consider me convinced. :) Let's try this the open source way then! Everyone is very welcome to join in on the conversation. As Vincent suggested I am going to split up my questions into three or four posts, roughly separated by topic. This first post contains rather general questions about the process and the stages of development, while the follow-up posts concentrate more on the project's management, people, structure and infrastructure. You can assume that I am aware of the development process as far as it is detailed on dev.xwiki.org and xwiki.com, and for my research I would like deepen this knowledge, especially on how the process is applied in practice, and how it is seen from within. So, without further ado, my first questions: As far as the process is concerned directly, which are the parts of development that profit most from the fact that XWiki is open source? It seems like XWiki has a rather large core team closely working together, and the Hall of Fame lists rather few external contributors. Does this reflect the actual distribution in the project? What are the costs and benefits of using open source development methods in this situation? Would communication patterns, knowledge management and development cycles be approached differently if XWiki was developed purely in-house? Another thing I'm interested in is how the scope of the project and the direction of development are decided on. To what degree do different stakeholders influence the course of XWiki, what is caused by personal itches of the developers, requests of paying customers, or complaints and suggestions of casual users? Is there a special time in the release cycle when new content is agreed upon? How far and in what detail can the content of future releases be planned ahead by the developers? Are detailed plans desirable, or is it more advantageous to react to circumstances when they arise? The third question concerns specialized tasks surrounding the development. XWiki follows diverse strategies for testing. One of them is manual, formal testing executed by a dedicated QA team. Does this part of the approach make the many-eyeballs-method of discovering bugs less important, or is a combination of these two strategies necessary for overall high quality of the code? Could automated testing stand on its with sufficient coverage? On a similar note, how do the different methods pursued in customer support (like detailed documentation, peers helping each other, and specialized paid support) interact and draw upon each other? I phrased the questions deliberately at length to roughly stake out the areas I would be more interested in. Every comment, opinion or experience that relates to the given topics is highly welcome. I will eagerly keep track of the mailing list for answers and follow up with the next round of my questions in a few days. Kind regards, Martin _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
