Release planning

[andypike]

Hi everyone,

For those that don't know, Adam announced the launch of the website on Facebook a few hours ago. Checkout http://www.lag.tv. We're not announcing on YouTube just yet as the site beds in, so don't spread the work just yet but feel free to register yourself :o)

I'm now thinking about release planning. We are and will continue to get bug reports and suggestions from the community. Most of these will come in through the forums so if we could keep an eye on these and add real issues to GitHub that would really help. I can see that some of you have already started doing this so thank you, that really helps.

With Adam we need to work out what issues should be part of the next release. I'm not sure about the best way to do this. Any suggestions? I think we should focus on bug fixes first which will give us a good stable foundation to build new features on.

Thoughts?

[cyclooctane]

Hi All

I personally think that Adam should drive the feature priorities, at
the end of the day, he is the one who has use the site.
However major security and bug fixes should get absolute priority. In
particular those that are security related.

I also think that we should be VERY careful about adding new features,
because they are likely to, A) break things; and B) increase the load
on the web server (and hence drive up hosting costs)
Careful testing is going to be a must because if we break the site now
that it is live, there are going to be a lot of unhappy fans.

I also believe in the release small and often philosophy.
I think that for each release we should work on 1 or 2 new features,
and any bug fixes.
This will allow us to release bug fixes and add new features
(hopefully) without breaking things.

Just my 2 cents.

Regards

Cyclooctane

[Andy Pike]

Yep, I agree 100%. I'll speak to Adam about release planning. Small and often is definitely the way to go in my book too :o)

[Kadover]

Took the words from my mouth really...

[andypike]

I spoke to Adam tonight about release planning and he agrees that small and often is the way to go. So here is the plan, feel free to tell me if the disagree.

As we are getting a lot of feedback from multiple places, it's hard for me to capture everything. So we need help from you guys (if you can of course). I know there are 3 or 4 people doing this already but I'd just like to reiterate it. Could you guys keep an eye out for suggestions etc on the forum and also in this group. If you feel it's a real issue and isn't already reported, can you create an issue in GitHub? I'll then focus my attention to the issues in GitHub only rather that trying to gather bits from all over the place. 

I'll then triage the submitted issues and comment where required. If it's something that has value (most things will have) then I'll move it into the Backlog milestone (https://github.com/andypike/lagtv/issues?milestone=5&page=1&state=open) otherwise I'll close the issue (might be a duplicate or some off the wall suggestion or just not possible for us anytime soon).

The Backlog is where we pick things to work on. I've created a new milestone called "Upgrade 1" (https://github.com/andypike/lagtv/issues?milestone=8&page=1&state=open). This will hold the few issues that will make up the next release. Please take a look and let me know if you are happy with this scope. It's hard to pick things as there are so many issues that I want to get done. I wanted to limit the release to six issues, this release contains some quick wins and important bug fixes. Let me know what you think.

There are a number of forum issues. As you may or may not know, for the forum we are using an open source forum engine called Forem (https://github.com/radar/forem). We are a behind the latest version and since we integrated it they have fixed a lot of problems. So I'd like to upgrade this and then retest the forum issues reported to us to see if they have been addressed already. This isn't a smal job and will probably be the only item in a future release. That's the reason that I haven't included any forum heavy issues.

I hope that makes some kind of sense. Let me know what you think.

Andy

[Kadover]

Sounds like a great plan of attack to me.

[Ludi Productions]

I agree with you there, Andy. Also see my Github suggestions if you haven't.

The contributors who are not mods/site support may agree with me here, but we would like to have control and lock some of these posts since we already addressed some of these issues. I say we have some guidelines and lock after 24-72 hours issue was addressed and posted on github. It will also help us and you Andy to keep track of who we responded to instead of checking every thread. We can unlocked these threads if we need to get more feedback.

[paul burns]

I agree with Ludi on this.
We do need guidelines for handling these requests, and we (ether the dev team or the mods) need to lock the thread once it is posted on github.
Otherwise it just gets to hard to track.

Regards

Cyclooctane