Hi Martin, here's my reply as well. Please see my answers below.
On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 8:43 PM, Martin Schönberger <[email protected]>wrote: > 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? > We get plenty of testing of all parts of XWiki from plenty of people, some of whom contribute specific fixes that would otherwise not be worked on. > 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? Yes and no. Sure, most full-time XWiki developers are paid by XWiki SAS, but it's also because the company went to hire active community members. There are also some former employees who are still contributors although no longer employed by XWiki SAS. > 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? > Not really. The same processes would be used, only limited to internal mailing lists. > 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? All of those factors play a role. Some customers pay for the development of very specific features or extensions. For instance, the Office document Import feature was paid for by a client. There is an internal roadmap process at XWiki SAS where stakeholders from every department can voice their priorities (sysadmin, dev, project management, sales, marketing, research...). Once this has been done, a roadmap is proposed, that members of the Open-Source community can add to if they wish. In addition to this, about 40-50% of the time of core developers is preserved so that they work on maintenance and bug fixing tasks, which they choose what to spend on. > 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? > Given the very frequent release cycle, meetings take place often. There is a new large release every year, interspersed by major releases every 2-3 months. There is a roadmap meeting for each of those, thus it's easy to gather feedback and make priorities evolve along the way. For a large release, a theme and a sub-theme are agreed on that set the general direction of that release. For major releases, a list of JIRA tasks is agreed on. 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? Open-Source users tests parts of the software not tested by the QA team, and vice-versa. Both methods complement each other. > Could automated testing stand on its with sufficient coverage? No. Some things cannot be tested automatically, especially on the look & feel side. > 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? > Documentation is updated based on the most frequent requests from customers. Paid support users are usually different from mailing list users, although some of the latter do convert to the former from time to time. Guillaume 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 > _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
