Summary of Foundation Meeting on 18th May

[rmehta]

Community,

Here is the summary of the foundation meeting on 18th May. This time there were lots of good discussions and we ran out of time. But we made great progress as usual!

Roadmap

There was a detailed discussion on roadmap on how we should move forward now that most of the issues are tagged. It was noted that there are 2 types of roadmaps, functional and technical. Python3 for example is a part of the technical roadmap. while a better bank statement reconciliation was an example of a functional roadmap.

The Frappe team was asked what is on their strategic roadmap. The Frappe team shared that they have never explicitly worked on a roadmap that lasted beyond a month. The feedback received from cloud users + forum + github was driving most of the process till now. Frappe team also shared two projects that are in their strategic roadmap. The Hub, which will be an information exchange for erpnext users and an offline version of ERPNext that will not be a client-server implementation.

Community members were requested add a thumbs up reaction to an issue on GitHub as a vote. So based on the votes make so far, Goals framework, Subscription Redesign are some of the issues that have been priority. It was decided to make community members aware of the “thumbs up” feature of GitHub so it can be used more often.

After a lot of discussion, it was decided that @Chude_Osiegbu and @JayRam would take the responsibility of building the roadmap and we would use GitHub Issues as the tool by which we will decide the roadmap. The roadmap will layout features that will be targeted for one quarter (June-August). The source of the roadmap will be the issues listed on GitHub and forum discussions. A draft roadmap will be discussed in the next meeting. After that we will create a GitHub milestone that can be monitored by everyone.

Testing, Security and Documentation

Members also thought it was necessary to add documentation and testing to the roadmap. Pawan suggested having a target of 2000 tests would be a great think to ensure stability and reliability that a lot of community members were asking for. It was decided that this would form a part of the roadmap.

Security aspects of ERPNext were also discussed in context of WannaCry attack. Frappe team shared that they promptly fixed any issues that were disclosed by various bounty hunters and staying on the most updated platforms was also very important, and hence the move to Python3 for example. It was decided that this was a longer discussion that needed more time.

Recruitment

There was a discussion on whether the foundation should hire more developers more than the two already hired. Many members felt that hiring would create the best impact for the foundation. A few members felt that instead of writing code, the foundation should only enable code. Alternative ways of investing foundation money were also discussed.

Initially we decided that having more code-sprints seems to be the way to achieve tangible results and also spread the community, but it felt that code sprints would require participation from local chapters to make it happen. Once the chapters are setup and the events start happening then we can assess how many code sprints we can have in a year.

Due to lack of time, it was decided that this should be discussed in the next meeting.

Events

Developer session Bangalore and GST Code Sprint in Mumbai were discussed as possible foundation events in June / July

thanks!

[clarkej]

Wonderful reporting you are a masterful leader Rushabh,

Excellent @Pawan -

@rmehta

Pawan suggested having a target of 2000 tests

With judicious test coverage - chronic trouble high maintenance spots and ideally a mix of gui, regression, smoketests maybe sql - and the more automatic and periodic the test suite runs - fixtures for test setup and listeners for test cleanup/teardown - and transparent reporting so all can better help troubleshoot…together you guys and the community can make a quantum step forward in Quality Assurance

Please excuse my 2 cents I got carried away here. Cheers and thanks…

[James_Robertson]

@rmehta

Community members were requested add a thumbs up reaction to an issue on GitHub as a vote. So based on the votes make so far, Goals framework, Subscription Redesign are some of the issues that have been priority. It was decided to make community members aware of the “thumbs up” feature of GitHub so it can be used more often.

I was actually looking into this today based on some other forum conversations. Apparently you can use a filter to see the top votes. To find the most requested put this in the filter box for issues

is:issue is:open sort:reactions-+1-desc

However, the question I have is bigger than the granular issue level of voting. A lot of conversation from the community has been at a module or whole system perspective. How do we get to “vote” on big things like improvements to accounts module overall, release management improvements, upgrade/install process improvements, etc? I guess we could make those “issues” and use a label of some kind, but that does not seem to fit in the model right.

How can we see the roadmap? Where is it going to be published? Can we comment on it? Is there a way to add issues to projects or milestones, give these a start and end date and then display that is some kind of gantt view?

Even if community can’t vote on this, just knowing what items the foundation is going to work on in a visual way to organize things and make it easier to see would be awesome.

Lastly, I am really glad you mentioned that there is a need to let the community know to use the thumbs up feature in issues to get votes on them. The main reason why I say this is there has been pretty much zero conversation over the past couple of weeks about the goals framework or subscription redesign. That is not what people are asking about.

@rmehta

Members also thought it was necessary to add documentation and testing to the roadmap.

From a testing perspective, there have been discussions on both auto and human manual testing. I am glad this is being discussed as well. Would cross-browser support be included in this piece of the roadmap? Lots of good discussions lately on that subject as well.

You guys are doing great from my perspective. Keep up the good work!

[spoojary]

@James_Robertson

I guess we could make those “issues” and use a label of some kind,

That is my suggestion as well. We have ~1000 issues now, but that is likely to grow very quickly as it gets more and more users. A lot of them might be related and would be solved by a single ‘feature’/‘improvement’. So it is very useful to create new ‘roadmap issues’, that gives a better perspective of the high level requirements.

If we get an agreement on that, we could update the app that I have mentioned in ERPNext Roadmap Document [Long Term Goal] - #13 by spoojary to capture all the requirements specific to our roadmap management. We will continue to use the github for detailed feature discussions, but use the app for capturing data needed for managing the roadmap. My previous company had a custom ‘backlog tool’ of prioritised roadmap items. One of the fields was input from account team telling how much valuable that feature is. That would be much more meaningful than a upvote button.

Btw, really great summary of the meetings minutes!