How to improve user involvement in development of ERPNext

ERPNext User Forum
17

Guys, can we do an whiteboard exercise?

There’s some levels of problems

  • Level 0
    • Install Bugs (they can affect everyone)
    • Migration Bugs ( they affect some users, depending on how they setup ERPNext)
  • Level 1
    • Module Bugs (they affect some users, that may have started use a module)
  • Level 2
    • They are business process challenges or integration between features in ERPNext
      • Examples (Scrap in Manufacturing, Sub-Contracting in Manufacturing)
    • There’s an upcoming feature, how understand
      • The boundaries of the feature
        • What is the problem this feature can resolve?
        • There’s problems out of the scope of the feature?
      • Available ways to contribute with the extension of the boundaries of the feature
        • Knowledge
        • Monetary
        • Work
  • Level 3
    • You are developing things around ERPNext
      • How contribute it back into a realistict time
      • How get support from the community to do that?
  • Level 4
    • Deprecations
      • How what’s being deprecated affect others?

If you face a problem in any level, how get support?

  • Disquss
    • If Discuss doesn’t resolve then, open an issue
    • How many time, to someone understand and address this?
    • What’s the impact for this bug
      • for the user who identify the bug
      • for the project
      • for the community
    • What’s the ETA time to get this resolved?
      • for the user who identify the bug
      • for the project visibility
      • for the community feelings
    • What’s the desirable time to get this resolved?
      • for the user who identify the bug
      • for the project visibility
      • for the community feelings

If we can monitor problems level 0 and 1 (with sentry.io), probably we can apply pareto’s law, to resolve 80% of the problems, with 20% of effort.

What’s the implication, of active monitory bugs in someone-else server? Like mozilla and chrome does with crash reports?

Problems of Level 2, 3 and 4, come from the daily user experience with ERPNext, this most of the time, is because

  • Some feature is incomplete (there’s no clear boundary definition)
  • Some functionality have been disabled from one version to another (intentionally or accidentally)
  • There’s some feature available, but it’s not documented (Ex: Transfer Warehouse in Packed Item)
  • Users are already using the system in ways developers never thought

Can these problems addressed if we:
*** Have a system of PE (Proposal Enhancements), where :**
** * community can vote at level 1**
** * community can comment for what passed to level 2 (due traction policy)**
** * community can define scope boundaries at level 3**
** * work (can the community sponsor this)**
** * Who in the community can take the leadership to coordinate work here?**

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