Roadmap or SDLC of ERPNext?

Community Foundation
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Hello Community,
Greetings.

I would really like to know more about SDLC(Software Development Life Cycle) of ERPNext. I really want to dive with requested features by the community people, contributions by the community, list of features those developed with Bounties, roadmap of ERPNext, to-do or features those are planned for just next version, fixes list and a lot more. How we community people can access it.

Just GitHub issues or Discussion forum? There is nothing organized. Also, there are a lot of open/closed discussions, which was stopped either not getting an answer or after requesting bounties by Frappe Team. Yes, I’m raising my point, I should contribute first & I’ll do.

How it works, by just with a tagline “Open Source ERP”, respected R. Mehta asking for Bounties with every single feature request. I know, there are some priority features that should be developed on a higher priority, if required contributions for bounties are acceptable. I honor that. But, with almost every single feature request, Frappe Team asking for bounties. Is this fare?

Let’s make it transparent to ERPNext community people. I request, don’t go to words or missing words, I’m not from Managment. I always appreciate ERPNext Project & Community, and Frappe Team Contribution. Nothing better than these people, but here nothing transparent.

Yes, also what about these “Feature Suggestions” wiki page. Is these features mentioned implemented? The page last updated as “Christopher G. Purbaugh edited this page on Aug 11, 2016 · 79 revisions” If, we are only resolving Github Issues, what about these features? There are already numerous good features requested almost a year ago.

I don’t here for getting hate now after this topic raised, I’m happy to contribute and open for lots of these discussions.

Edit/Update:
Till, I hadn’t looked at Survey results that recently organized by Rishabh, he took initiatives and splendid step taken on time, which was required. and Hence, Data is transparent. You may say, It was my frustration above, But data said already very well.

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Your and many people’s approach is that this is somebody’s product, somebody has built it and we are just using it.

The day you start believing that this is your product and you start taking pride and responsibility in what has been created you will find the strength, the energies and the courage to make ERPNext what you want it to be.

You are welcome to take a more active role and answer many of the questions you asked, not just for yourself, but for the whole community.

We are Open Source. We have limited resources in terms of money. You know we have 4 developers that work directly for the Foundation. Some of the 4 are coming up to speed on ERPNext and very soon we will be firing on all 4 cylinders.

The Road Map Committee of which I am a part will try and answer some of your questions.

We will come up with a roadmap that will please some people but not all. If your feature is not on the roadmap, you have a few options:

  1. Develop it yourself and push it back to ERPNext
  2. If you are not a developer, find a developer and inspire her/him (with money, if necessary) to develop this functionality and push it back to ERPNext
  3. If it takes too mush inspiration (meaning money), find others in the community that like this feature and collaborate with them to pool money and resources.

All answers require more effort, involvement and ownership than making impassioned posts here. :slight_smile:

No offense meant, so please don’t take any.

Thanks

Jay

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Very well answered @JayRam :slight_smile: I am not sure I have much to add.

There is a simpler answer. We don’t plan

To quote 37 signals

Planning is guessing

Unless you’re a fortune teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.

Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Change the name of your business plans to business guesses, your financial plans to financial guesses, and your strategic planning to strategic guessing. Now you can stop worrying about them as much. They just aren’t worth the stress, and the false sense of control they provide can be dangerous.

When you turn guesses into plans, you enter a danger zone. Plans let the past drive the future. They put blinders on you. “This is where were going because, well, that’s where we said we were going.” And that’s the problem: Plans are inconsistent with improvisation.

And you have to be able to improvise. You have to be able to pick up new opportunities that come along, which by the very nature of things, cannot be “planned.” Sometimes you need to say, “Were going in a new direction because that’s what makes sense today.”

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Github is used extensively.
watch or star bench, frappe and erpnext repositories,
it’ll keep you updated about latest pull requests and issues.

Github Issues are watched by developers and solved.
If there is an issue, eventually it will be solved.
Although 2FA was not part of milestones it is part of frappe now!

https://github.com/frappe/frappe/issues/3047

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By development model i dont see a roadmap, but a public backlog of pending and in process tasks should be created. Especially not to duplicate efforts and that someone from the community goes to work on tasks that are already planned in the foundation. Trello [1] is a wonderful tool to manage this, and have github integration [2].

[1] https://trello.com/
[2] Trello

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The solution is to contribute new features or solve existing open issues.
But no one will develop code for free.

So workaround is, if you need any feature which is stopping you from starting use of erpnext, hire developer to build and contribute it back. https://erpnext.org/erpnext-jobs

If you don’t want to pay, then you can create github issues and wait for someone to fix it.
If its useful and generic feature then it will be added in small span of time.
You can see POS development or footer development print pdf.

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I would love to see these projects getting contributed back. So far its been very disappointing.

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I see this in a lot of open source projects. Many people do not understand that sharing code / knowledge benefits all of us. In the end, not sharing not only directly hurts the growth of the project, but ends up generating a divided community.

If someone pays for a functionality, it is understood to be for the benefit of all, it must have an impact on the project, so @rmehta says. Other people will contribute the code, because yes, there are people who code for free or release the internal modifications of the company for the benefit of all.

What if it can annoy more than one collaborator, is to make the effort of weeks or months to create a functionality and then to find that it was already doing the foundation or another collaborator, so if I think a backlog would be interesting.

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Most parters say that “don’t add features”. I think they say this because they want to monetise, its a perverse incentive. The biggest antidote to this is that we must keep pushing features at a frantic pace so that custom features keep breaking. That will be the only reason parters start contributing :slight_smile:

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I dont think anyone has actually mentioned the Foundation Roadmap ERPNext Roadmap - Google Sheets

This is where the github issues have milestones allocated on them based on the popularity of the requested new features etc

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It’s really between the devil and the deep-blue sea. If you push features at a frantic rate, it may achieve your aim of encouraging others to contribute because of breaking functionality but it also makes the software change so rapidly that businesses that actually want to pay for it don’t because they prioritize stability and predictability over new features. If businesses don’t buy in, developers/SIs/Consultants won’t buy in.
At some point we cannot discount the (immediate) profit motive from interest in ERPNext. I think we have to find ways to use this profit motive to engineer the behaviour in those who we think can help us achieve our ideological aims. For me, the bounty system makes sense but with slight modifications:

  • Make bounties more visible (if possible bring them to erpnext.org. Let’s have the bounties on there the same way we have ERPNext Jobs).

  • Let’s seed the bounties from our road-maps topics.

  • Let’s make the bounties more competitive (I’m looking at the bounty for Financial Consolidation - $100 - and I’m pretty sure no one’s going to lose sleep doing it if it’s not a critical need for them). This way, people can submit their pull requests as their entries to win the bounties and the person/group whose implementation get’s the most votes from those who contributed for the bounty wins the cash and has their submission merged in by the foundation. We may even decide to weight votes by the amounts donated.

With this, open source wins, developers get rewards for their efforts, the tool matures faster, everybody wins.

Combine this with a LTS (long term support) and cutting edge distribution strategy and I think we might have a winner.

Edit: And i’m not saying this to be on the receiving end of the bounties. I just really see the potential of ERPNext and Frappe Framework and would like for it to mature to the point where it gives some of the big names a run for their money. I’ll most likely be sponsoring some of those bounties if we get the bounty program right.

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The only sustainable way to make money in an open source environment is to make money off services - Implementation, Adding new features for the first time, etc.

Make the product better and you have more service avenues opening up as more companies jump on the ERPNext bandwagon.

Keep the features to yourself and you think that’s giving you competitive advantage, but whatever you are gaining in competitive advantage, you are losing an order of magnitude on service revenues.

Like I heard one service provider say that they’d built a functional and basic connector to Magento. I still don’t see that being contributed back and there are others that are clamoring for the integration.

If that had been contributed back, each of the organizations that wanted to implement ERPNext and Magento would have perhaps hired this service provider to implement ERPNext for them. And that’s easy inbound business.

Please remember as you contribute back, your credibility grows. And you get hired for more implementations.

If you want to really price your apps, please switch over to Odoo. That’s how their ecosystem works. We decided not to pursue that model.

If you really want to create something, build something from the ground up, like Rushabh and Team Frappe did with Frappe & ERPNext. Living off ERPNext but not contributing back is unfair and unreasonable is my frank opinion.

And I say that both as the CEO of the Foundation and as a service provider.

Thanks

Jay

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I mentioned Trello when I first saw that spreadsheet. In my opinion it is a manual attempt to do what makes perfect Trello. I put an example then of the public development of a game as it is Subnautica, where they have panels with votes [1], roadmap [2], development journal [3] and dashboard with all panels of development company [4]. This tool allows have comments, voting, attachments, screenshots, integration with github, mobile app, checklists, subscribe to taks changes, integration with gdrive/dropbox/onedrive/box.net … [5] and its free at start [6], testing it only cost time :wink:

[1] Trello
[2] Trello
[3] Trello
[4] Trello
[5] What is Trello: Learn Features, Uses & More | Trello
[6] Which Trello Plan Is Best for You? Our Pricing Guide Can Help | Trello

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I understand the reluctance with using Trello. It’s not open source and there’s no guaranty that the costs will continue to be free (unlike Frappe/ERPNext). I think it’s features might be overkill for what we’re trying to achieve here. In my opinion ERPNext jobs is already 50% there. Just slap on a “Contribute” button against each bounty that uses the Stripe or Paypal integrations to accept contributions into the foundation’s account, use a tree to classify the bounties based on functional/technical areas and then give it prime visibility on ERPNext: Free and Open Source Cloud ERP Software and I think we’ll see improved traction.

Don’t kill Jobs, just add Bounties and let people crowd-fund non-specific functionality that’s important to them. They can use Jobs for thing’s that aren’t generic. Key point is, make the bounties attractive by advertising them in a central and frequently visited location.

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Awesome suggestion. We already have plugged in the payment gateway in erpnext.org. I will hackup a bounty solution soon :slight_smile:

Lets do this!

I was thinking more of it as an outcome rather than a goal. In the long run this also defines culture. Like Jay said, there is the Odoo way and there is 100% open source way. This road might be longer, but I see if we all make it happen, it will be a great contribution to humanity :slight_smile:

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Free tool i know Taiga [1] and Restyaboard (not 100% free) [2]. But implement them will be another tool to maintain by Foundation. Trello now is propierty of atlassian [3], i doubt that they change conditions, they didn’t it with bitbucket.

[1] https://taiga.io/
[2] http://restya.com/board
[3] Trello Is Being Acquired By Atlassian

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Just thinking: (general and not responding to any individual)

  1. What if it was not an Open-Source Project?
  2. It’s not that difficult to license an application / software make it IP and throw it in the market which one can get with bucks only! I guess.
  3. Considering existing team members it is already well organized for that count.
  4. If one just host the solution and start providing services without contributing back to origin, it should result in asking for bounties until ecosystem works properly in the right direction.
  5. Frappe / ERPNext team is not unlimited (not having unlimited resources).
  6. Now suggest if I am wrong: does open-source mean that the owner is bound to fulfill and provide the requested feature by any of the community member? I don’t think so!
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