As previously announced, the Project Management and Delivery Excellence Initiative launched last month to address a number of issues related to project management. One of the issues identified in the original announcement was a lack of standard communication and collaboration tools.
In the recent past, the team was using a number of project management tools. These included:
The team has spent the past couple of weeks evaluating the options to address these issues. Many considerations were made including the cost, capabilities, and ease of use of each solution, as well as the effort required to migrate existing content to new solutions. Ultimately, we are recommending a limited number of changes to the tools themselves, but significant changes in how they are managed and maintained. Retaining the existing tools will make migration to the new host low-risk and relatively quick. Here is what the Development Tools and Process Standardization Initiative recommended:
The link to the new platform is: https://dashpay.atlassian.net, and sign-up is now open. All the tools (except for Bamboo, which is only relevant to core developers) will be open to public contribution. We hope that this solution not only makes the team more efficient, but we also hope to provide greater transparency and make it easier for contributors to get involved in projects, development, or addressing community questions.
We'd like to enourage everyone to use the Service Desk to submit any issues found on the platform, and use this thread to discuss how our community could benefit the most from this solution.
In the recent past, the team was using a number of project management tools. These included:
- JIRA for development tracking and bug reporting
- Confluence for an information wiki and hosting of FAQs
- Bamboo - a continuous integration tool used for development
- JIRA was effective - when it was used properly - but fell into disuse and became outdated
- Confluence was ideal for wiki and FAQ, but there was no option to ask questions
- Confluence also became outdated over time since there was no assigned owner or defined update process
- Lack of a single sign-on across tools meant contributors registered for each tool separately - creating additional hurdles for those wishing to contribute
- The platform was hosted by one community member, which posses a potential risk**
- The tools were used by only a small subset of community members
The team has spent the past couple of weeks evaluating the options to address these issues. Many considerations were made including the cost, capabilities, and ease of use of each solution, as well as the effort required to migrate existing content to new solutions. Ultimately, we are recommending a limited number of changes to the tools themselves, but significant changes in how they are managed and maintained. Retaining the existing tools will make migration to the new host low-risk and relatively quick. Here is what the Development Tools and Process Standardization Initiative recommended:
- JIRA - an industry leading tool - will be used for assisting the development and quality assurance by organizing to-dos and prioritizing issues. It will also be open up to the public so the community can easily help in bug testing/reporting.
- JIRA Service Desk addon will handle community submissions to the teams working on Dash, whether they be bugs, ideas, or suggestions.
- Confluence will be used for both internal and external documentation, with the intention of improving overall project documentation, and having a central place where community members can find information.
- Confluence Questions will be used as a place where community members can ask and answer questions about Dash. It's like a community maintained FAQ, where both team and community members can contribute by answering the questions raised. Combined with the superb search functionality of Confluence this tool can be used as the central place for distributed knowledge related to Dash.
- Bamboo will be used by the development team for automated tests and builds
- The entire platform will be professionally hosted by Atlassian with multiple administrators on the team to provide redundancy
The link to the new platform is: https://dashpay.atlassian.net, and sign-up is now open. All the tools (except for Bamboo, which is only relevant to core developers) will be open to public contribution. We hope that this solution not only makes the team more efficient, but we also hope to provide greater transparency and make it easier for contributors to get involved in projects, development, or addressing community questions.
We'd like to enourage everyone to use the Service Desk to submit any issues found on the platform, and use this thread to discuss how our community could benefit the most from this solution.
