Kohsuke, Thanks for your honest and open response about my query about Cloudbees resources allocated to Blue Ocean.
I am very happy with Cloudbees' investment in Blue Ocean. When I show the UI to co-workers and managers, they are impressed. That in turn makes it easier to promote the use of Pipeline and other "modern" Jenkins technologies in organizations that are using Jenkins, but may not be on the latest stuff. In terms of Blue Ocean, I have seen initially a very active and engaging involvement from Cloudbees in terms of kicking off the project and carrying it along. Unfortunately, the involvement from Cloudbees has become much more passive. From what you have described, there are a few passionate and talented developers at Cloudbees who are holding the fort on Blue Ocean. I am grateful for the enthusiasm, skill, and motivation of these developers. It is always a pleasure to interact with Cloudbees developers. However, my concern is that if the current mode is "holding the fort", then the appearance from the outside is that Blue Ocean is being passionately supported by a few developers, but it is not a high priority from Cloudbees management, and the developers are not being actively supported or given a clear direction/roadmap to work on Blue Ocean. In other companies, I have seen where this mode of operation can lead to burnout and frustration on behalf of developers. I understand that Cloudbees is focusing on a lot of technical areas which are very important for the future of the Jenkins ecosystem. I'm glad to see this. I also understand that resources are limited, and deciding what resources to allocate to what project can be tricky. Blue Ocean is a significant piece of technical work, and due to its complexity, I think Cloudbees should continue to have a leadership role in its ongoing maintenance/bugfixes, and evolution. There just are not enough developers in the open source Jenkins community who are versed enough in modern Javascript/NodeJS to make significant contributions to Blue Ocean. I would like to suggest the following: 1. Cloudbees should select one person, either a developer or manager to "own" Blue Ocean. 2. The owner of Blue Ocean should make regular appearances (maybe once week) in the Blue Ocean gitter channel: https://gitter.im/jenkinsci/blueocean-plugin to get an idea what problems the community is having with Blue Ocean, and also give periodic updates on future plans, roadmap, etc. 3. All bugs in JIRA should be assigned to this owner of Blue Ocean. There should be no unassigned Blue Ocean bugs. Also, bugs assigned to previous owners, such as James Dumay, should be assigned to the active owner. 4. This owner should triage bugs into separate piles: easy to fix, hard to fix, won't fix, etc. 5. Cloudbees should assign 1 or 2 developers to officially work on Blue Ocean part-time, say 1 to 2 days a week, to work on the Blue Ocean bug backlog. If other Cloudbees developers pitch in and help out, that's awesome, but there should be at least a few developers officially assigned to Blue Ocean, and aware of the roadmap. 6. If possible, Cloudbees should assign a UI/UX person for maybe 1 day a week to oversee overall changes to Blue Ocean, and make sure that any changes improve UI and usability, and don't become a new kitchen sink. In terms of the work that needs to be done on Blue Ocean, my gut feeling is that there are two categories: 1. Maintenance/bugfixes and minor filling of "pot holes" to bring Blue Ocean to feature parity with the Classic UI. 2. Major interface changes to the Blue Ocean UI. For example, adding customized test reports to Blue Ocean test report viewer: https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-50589 If Cloudbees can at least allocate some resources to officially work on Category 1 at a low level of activity, that would be an improvement over the current situation. Thanks again for listening to my feedback. Feel free to contact me off the mailing lists for further feedback. I am also in the SF Bay Area, and can drop by the Cloudbees office to chat if you want. A few years ago, I dropped by the Cloudbees office to chat with Andrew Bayer about Pipeline. -- Craig On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 5:41 PM Kohsuke Kawaguchi <[email protected]> wrote: > > For the time being, CloudBees is doing what it can to fix regressions, > bugs, and doing the necessary maintenance to retain the same level of > functionalities as the rest of Jenkins evolves. Many of the people who have > worked on Blue Ocean are still around, such as Keith, Nicu, Josh, Ivan, et > al. And what you saw is them holding the fort. I will do my part to ensure > Jenn to get the necessary organizational support to engage in the community > and form a plan, and to have that communicated well when that happens. Or > if somebody else is willing to step up and carry the torch forward, I’d > love that, too. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jenkins Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/CAG%3DrPVcZpEKTPr8a%3D86_qx33Z7jxFoJTjCBPUnSHB-EvXsDsHQ%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
