Process

Timeframe

The Drupal 7 Commerce Initiative set DrupalCon San Francisco as the (very aggressive) deadline for the first Drupal Commerce release. Demonstrating code and functionality at such a major event in the Drupal community will be key for the project's adoption and rapid growth. So... how will we get there?

Scrum Based Process

We'll be adapting the Open Scrum proposal (from the Pentaho Wiki). Our adaptations include such things as:

  • Integrating the community voice into a development process that suits manageable teams and depends on single person decision making.
  • Figuring out communication across the project so people give and receive the feedback they need as they work on the code.
  • Community wide scrum meetings in IRC to plan and review development sprints, supplemented by physical meetings for rapid code development.

Target Release Cycles

We're planning toward release cycles of 6 months with monthly development sprints throughout. Each sprint should conclude with code that is production ready if not feature complete. In this way, we can better track our progress and adjust release dates if necessary.

The monthly cycle will roughly involve...

  • An IRC kickoff meeting where we plan the next development sprint.
  • A month or so of development, though this may be adjusted down as the code matures.
  • Community task review and testing.

(Content below here should be considered incomplete... this page is a work in progress.)

Sprint → Community Review → Testing → Commits → Milestone Close Meeting / Documentation Updates → Kickoff meeting for next Sprint.

Our first cycle begins October 26th, and ends on Monday, November 30th. We'll release an alpha candidate. The second cycle starts on December 1st and goes until January 4th. The third cycle starts on January 5th and ends February 1st. At the end of the third cycle, we'll release a beta release candidate. The 4th cycle begins February 2nd, ending March 1st. The 5th cycle begins March 2nd and ends March 31st. The 5th cycle ends with a release of Ubercore 1.0. A new cycle begins on April 1st, 2010.

4. What Documentation? Where?

d7uc.org is not a support site, an issue tracker, a project management system, or a development forum.

We don't want to actively prevent people from contributing from the long tail, but we might passively do so. The design document should not be the feature backlog, because you cannot accept any random contribution. Simply providing voting systems does not encourage substantive contribution and brainstorming. When a patch is contributed mid-sprint, it can percolate in the issue queue and be reviewed between sprints for addition in the feature log of the next sprint.

a) D7UC.org

Initiative Documentation
API (Development Documentation)
Roadmaps
Architecture Documents (and archives)
Index of issue tags

b) Drupal.org

Issue Queues
Assigning tasks for development
Release Candidates

c) Ubercart.org

User Documentation