OFBiz Community Involvement and Jira (repost from 2005-04-15)

OFBiz is getting big. The code and features are getting big. The community is getting big. Because of this the way we have been managing things is becoming a bottleneck. The proposed solution, as presented here, is to organize and facilitate community involvement. This will happen primarily through Jira, and the process is described here.

Pretty much everyone involved in OFBiz does things on their own time and decides what they want to work on, or does things on an employer's or client's time, and prioritizes the needs and requests of those "what pay for da time."

I certainly try to handle incoming requests and issues, but at times it is simply more than I as an individual can handle. I really appreciate the help of Jacopo, and sometimes various others on these things, but more is needed...

With a tool like Jira we really can have more community involvement, and it would help a lot! There are dozens of outstanding issues in Jira, and various other bugs, issues, priorities, etc that are not in Jira. For things that aren't in Jira, we should push submissions there more, and I plan to start entering the things that I would like to work on there.

=========== THE KEY:

To help with my decisions on priorities for these and other things, I would REALLY appreciate community feedback. This helps the project serve the needs of those who are using it better, and it allows me to step out of the position of being that bad guy that tells people who have invested effort into something: sorry, I won't review it and put it in because in my opinion it is a lower priority than other outstanding issues.

How to help?

1. vote for tasks/issues in Jira that you think are important!
2. review submissions and improvements in Jira and comment on them
3. if you have a pet-peeve or other issue, submit it as a Jira issue with good detail, and then vote for it

This will help those that do the final review and commit to feel more comfortable that there are no major issues with the changes and additions, and if there are issues to get them resolved before the final review and commit effort begins.

If you have an issue that you think is important and no one is looking at it, don't ask me or the other commiters to take care of it, send a message to the users or dev mailing list and ask people to review it and vote for it.

There have been various discussions about this over time, and I think the project is to the point where not doing things this way is preventing growth and progress...

I'm very interested in hearing feedback on this, and even MORE interested in seeing feedback and voting going on in Jira.

Thanks to everyone for all of your help. I know you have put a lot of effort into contribution to the project, and it is these efforts that makes OFBiz what it is.