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.
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.
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