Over the past years, we’ve seen a lot of growth in both Umbraco HQ and the community, so it is essential to us to scale our processes and tools according to the increased engagement and make it even easier for all to collaborate on Umbraco projects.
First order of business is the whole issue management process. One of the challenges with our old tracker is the lack of a clear process and the lack of consistent management - this is now changing.
We are introducing several new initiatives to simplify and improve the process, including:
- Recurring product sessions at HQ to ensure we evaluate and process ALL incoming feature requests.
- Simplification of type: Transitioning to using only using Feature Request and Bug.
- Implementing an idea list for feature requests that are not currently getting priority nor attention, but provide valuable input and suggestions for future improvements.
- Generally, move open product discussion off the tracker and onto the forum on our.umbraco.com to ensure the debate can continue and that we can keep the tracker focused on current priorities.
- Handling all bugs properly in relation to their impact and urgency.
- Ensuring all issues move out of state “open” to avoid stockpiling unhandled issues.
- Setup tracking and reporting to ensure we stay on top of the flow.
The person in charge of the issue tracker management and implementation of the new initiatives is our very own Sebastiaan Janssen, who is already in charge of our pull request (PR) process. Sebastiaan will be updating you further on these changes as they are introduced.
Second order of business is the issue tracker itself. It has been suggested several times in the community, most recently during the open sessions at this year’s Codegarden, that using GitHub for issue tracking would make the most sense. Especially given that we already use GitHub for our codebase and PR flow.
We couldn’t agree more on this and we are happy to share with you that we are moving to GitHub issue tracker - now! So going forward, we will manage all our codebases, issues, pull requests and processes on GitHub.
The new issue tracker on GitHub will start as a clean slate, but as soon as it is up and running, we will look through recent issues on the old tracker. We will recreate issues that we believe require more attention as new issues on GitHub. We will only transfer a limited amount of data, but we will keep all the existing data available on the original URLs for easy reference and we invite anyone to re-create issues on Github that they believe require our attention.
We are very excited to bring these improvements to the Umbraco community and we have high ambitions and expectations on its positive impact on future collaboration for open source Umbraco projects. The work on implementing the new process initiatives and transitioning to GitHub issues starts today, so stay tuned for more updates and thank you for your collaboration.
See you on GitHub! :)
