Project directions

[Jordi Salvat i Alabart]

Dear co-contributors,

I've been thinking about some non-technical JMeter issues which I'd like
to share with you. It's mostly issues that have been raised into this
list during the recent weeks and have been only partially addressed. I'm just exposing them here because I think they need further discussion.

1/ Committers

We all agree that we need to keep the ball rolling (in my case, because I use JMeter for work and need it getting better as fast as possible, others will have their own reasons). My (our?) current strategy is to get as much people on-board as possible: if they don't touch at CVS, makes no harm, if they touch, it makes progress. Of course this was absolutely necessary at the recent stage of the project, where it was getting stalled, but can become a problem in the future. Would be nice to discuss where we want go to in this matter. For example, I would propose a consensus policy requiring any committer to relinquish his rights before unsubscribing from the dev mailing list -- if we ever suspect someone has "disappeared" from the project, we can ping him on the list. If we do this, we will know how many active committers there are, and we can react if it gets below a certain threshold.

2/ Contributions

We want to encourage the people who use JMeter to contribute. I believe the best way to do this is to make things easy for them. In my opinion, there's some technical aspects of JMeter which place a too high threshold on this. The relationship between GUI and test elements and this Avalon configuration stuff were the most important for me. Poor JavaDoc documentation is another. Absence of nightly builds is probably the worse. Even sloppy indenting contributes to the difficulties. Is there any non-technical issues we should address on this matter?

3/ Long-term development plan

We lack a long-term development plan. JMeter is still far from being a mature product, yet its development is mainly driven by bug-fixing and small functional enhancements. At the very least, we need to agree on a loose high-level end-user requirement list [I think I already have a document of this kind somewhere -- the one I used to select JMeter among other tools quite a few months ago].

Opinions?

Salut,

Jordi.


--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>