[xwiki-devs] [ANN] Definition of Cycle Themes for XS from XWiki SAS

Hi devs, Even though it’s up to every committer (and the companies behind them) to decide what they want to work on during each release and thus during each Cycle (see https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/VersioningAndReleasePractice…), I’m posting this message below to be fully transparent. It corresponds to a commitment from XWiki SAS’s on how they’d like to treat Cycles from now on. XWiki SAS has decided internally to define better what a "Cycle Theme” means. The idea is for XWiki SAS to help plan roadmaps and cycles better (and be meaningful since right now a Theme doesn’t mean much), and we have an upcoming 11.x cycle coming soon. So here’s the proposal: Exec summary ============ * XWiki committers who are working for XWiki SAS will make sure that in each release of the Cycle there’s at least one roadmap item related to the Cycle Theme. * Of course XWiki committers not working for XWiki SAS can work on whatever they want during a Cycle :) Details ====== * Definition: "Having a Theme for a Cycle means that in each roadmap version for the Cycle there’s at least one item related to the Theme." * A Cycle can have one or more Themes with an ordering of Themes. When there's more than 1 Theme, an ordering of the Themes needs to be defined (main Theme, sub Theme, etc). For ex if “Usability (1st) + Security&Privacy (2nd)” are selected then there could be for example 2 items related to usability and 1 item for Security & Privacy per version. * However, seen the XWiki SAS current workforce and to leave margins for unplanned items, it was suggested to restrict to only 1 Theme in a Cycle FTM (XWiki SAS has currently 3 to 3.5 FTEs working on XWiki Standard). It could be possible to go to 2 themes but then it might be hard to enforce it so that idea was dropped for now (could be expanded next year if all goes well or if there’s more manpower). Note that it’s not because, for example, that Security would not be in the Theme that XWiki SAS wouldn't work on Security. It just means there’d be no guarantee that there’d be Security-related items in *each* roadmap. It would be decided on a per-roadmap level. * Examples of valid Themes (a theme needs to be large enough to sustain at least 11 items since we have 11 versions in a cycle): ** Usability ** Performance ** Consistency ** Accessibility ** Security & Privacy (GPRD, etc). Note: I’m putting Privacy along with Security since I’m not sure we would have enough items for Privacy as a standalone Theme. Thanks -Vincent, with my XWiki SAS hat