I've seen a good progress, during the last few months, in the activity
around the issues in our issue tracker: new contributors/developers have
joined this great project and are helping a lot with bug fixes,
enhancements, proposals; on the other hand, the committers are working
hard to review/update/resolve the new issues coming in (more now than in
the past).
I think that one of the reasons for this positive change is that the
Jira notifications are posted directly to the dev list, so that
conversations happening as comments in a Jira issue are not so different
form the ones posted to the list.
In order to further improve this activity, I'd suggest a few small
changes to the way Jira is administered now:
1) put more people in the "ofbiz-developers" Jira group; the advantages are:
1a) we can officially define the group of (established) OFBiz
developers/contributors (that are the ones that sooner or later could
become committers); I think that the decision to include a new persons
should be taken using the ASF voting procedure
1b) they will be able to assign issues to them, and help update and
clean the old issues
2) create in Jira at least two target releases, one would be the post
graduation release (cooming soon), while the second could be a longer
term release, with no Release Date, that will be released as soon as all
the issues assigned to it will be completed; issues can be assigned to
the longer term release only in one of the following situations:
2a) by community vote ("Vote: set the target for Jira issue #OFBIZ-XYZ
to release X")
2b) the developer that assigns the issue to the release, also assigns
the issue to himself ("ok, I'll work on this issue, and I'll complete it
in a reasonable amount of time, because I want it in the X release");
these issues should be bug fixes or obvious improvements (I mean
something that doesn't need a community vote because the consensus is
implied)
In my opinion, with these simple rules in place we will promote two main
objectives:
A) increase, motivate the developers' group
B) share some community driven goals for releases
What do you think of these ideas?
Jacopo
