Robot Framework roadmap

[Pekka Klärck]

Hi!

I was on holiday most of July (well, it was more like a work camp
painting our new summer cottage) and will continue holidays a bit
still in August (this time for real). Between the "holiday" and the
real holiday I had time thinking about forthcoming Robot Framework
releases and have created a high level roadmap using GitHub
milestones:
https://github.com/robotframework/robotframework/milestones

The first release is RF 3.2.2 planned for early September. It's mainly
a bug fix release but may see some small and safe enhancements as
well. This is the last planned release in the RF 3.2.x series so
please report possible issues you have encountered with RF 3.2 soon so
that they can be fixed. If you haven't yet tested RF 3.2 in your
environment, now would be a good time!

The next bigger release is also planned for this year, early December,
and has version RF 4.0. The main new features are some important
enhancements to the listener API (helping e.g. implementing debuggers)
and addition of the long awaited skip status. Because skipping tests
is so similar functionality than the current possibility to mark tests
non-critical, the whole criticality concept is going to be removed at
the same time. This is a rather big change and thus the major version
number is incremented from 3 to 4. This release is currently planned
to support Python 2, mainly because Jython support is still so
important, but that may still change.

After RF 4.0 it's very likely we need one or two RF 4.0.x bug fix
releases and possibly also RF 4.x feature releases. I want Robot
Framework to start following semantic versioning (https://semver.org/)
more closely than earlier and thus plan to be changing major and minor
version numbers more often. Related to this, I'd like releases to be
smaller than previous releases like RF 3.2 that took over a year to be
ready.

The last currently planned bigger release is RF 5.0 containing native
IF/ELSE and TRY/EXCEPT support as well as nested control structures. I
would hope this release to be ready during the first half of 2021, but
it's so far in the future and changes needed to the execution logic
and logs are so big that I cannot make any real promises. One certain
thing is that this release will only support Python 3.6 or newer.


To learn more about these releases and cool features included in them
check out the milestones page mentioned above. This is just a high
level roadmap so many things are likely to change before releases are
out. If you have comments about individual features, you can comment
relevant issues (or submit new ones if needed), reply to this email,
or join the discussion on the #devel channel in our Slack community.
If you'd like to help with these releases, you can create pull
requests, test releases (incl. RF 3.2), or sponsor the development.
The easiest way to sponsor is getting your organization to join the
Robot Framework Foundation (https://robotframework.org/foundation).

Thanks to the Robot Framework Foundation for the continued support and
to the whole community for being awesome!


Cheers,
.peke
--
Agile Tester/Developer/Consultant :: http://eliga.fi
Lead Developer of Robot Framework :: http://robotframework.org