+1 Thanks, Eduard On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 1:34 AM, Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]> wrote:

On 01/03/2013 06:53 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:

...

Hi everyone,

We're getting close to the end of the 4.x cycle (only one more release, 4.5, which should be out at the end of January) and thus we need to start thinking about 5.x (see http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/VersioningAndReleasePractices)

As a reminder here are our past themes: * 3.x: Theme 1: "Building Apps and Distributing them" (This means for example that the Extension Manager in progress is a key element of XE 3.x. It also means making it easier to create applications in XE.), Theme 2: "Polishing" * 4.x: Theme 1 (top priority): Ease of use, Theme 2: Quality

Internally at XWiki SAS we've had a brainstorming meeting with everyone to discuss what could be the main themes for XWiki 5.x

The result is the following:

Theme: Speed and Simplicity -----------------------------------------

Mission:

Improve XWiki's usage for new and regular users by improving Usability and Usage Speed in order to make XWiki simpler and faster both from a pure performance point of view and from are user interface point of view.

Technical details:

- Individual Feature Improvement from a Usability perspective including speed of access (real time updates, commenting in activity stream) - General Usability Improvements on XE and XEM for simplicity - Technical Rewrite of certain features (activity stream) for performance or architecture reasons - General Performance Improvement of XWiki (page loading, rendering time) - Bug Fixing in general

+1.

-- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

On Jan 7, 2013, at 11:52 AM, Paul Libbrecht <[email protected]> wrote:

Vincent,

we are more and more on the side of "usage analytics". While I do not know the statistics module, I think a homogenization and up-scaling of the activity-stream together with the statistics module would be really useful and would support the installers or admin into raising usability.

For the AS it's a given since it's unmaintainable as it is (written in wiki pages) and will be rewritten in Java, taking into account some not currently implemented use cases. For the stats, yes it would be a good idea too. First we have to assess performances of the stats since a big goal is to make XWiki faster and I've heard plenty of times that stats are disabled because of performance issues so we need to measure that first.

Maybe also spreading the practice of usability testing would be really useful.

Sure, if you have some process (especially automated) to do that, it would be great. From a general POV we're already doing some kind of usability testing by having xwiki open source and releasing often and having users discuss issues on our mailing lists/jira. But if you have specific ideas, please shoot, so that we can discuss them :) Thanks -Vincent

I know how to do so for search (and had advised that to Savitha at the time, I could find examples). I do not know well how to do so for other tasks but maybe this can be found out.

Paul

Le 6 janv. 2013 à 00:34, Sergiu Dumitriu a écrit :

...

On 01/03/2013 06:53 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:

...

Hi everyone,

We're getting close to the end of the 4.x cycle (only one more release, 4.5, which should be out at the end of January) and thus we need to start thinking about 5.x (see http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/VersioningAndReleasePractices )

As a reminder here are our past themes: * 3.x: Theme 1: "Building Apps and Distributing them" (This means for example that the Extension Manager in progress is a key element of XE 3.x. It also means making it easier to create applications in XE.), Theme 2: "Polishing" * 4.x: Theme 1 (top priority): Ease of use, Theme 2: Quality

Internally at XWiki SAS we've had a brainstorming meeting with everyone to discuss what could be the main themes for XWiki 5.x

The result is the following:

Theme: Speed and Simplicity -----------------------------------------

Mission:

Improve XWiki's usage for new and regular users by improving Usability and Usage Speed in order to make XWiki simpler and faster both from a pure performance point of view and from are user interface point of view.

Technical details:

- Individual Feature Improvement from a Usability perspective including speed of access (real time updates, commenting in activity stream) - General Usability Improvements on XE and XEM for simplicity - Technical Rewrite of certain features (activity stream) for performance or architecture reasons - General Performance Improvement of XWiki (page loading, rendering time) - Bug Fixing in general

+1.

-- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

...

we are more and more on the side of "usage analytics". While I do not know the statistics module, I think a homogenization and up-scaling of the activity-stream together with the statistics module would be really useful and would support the installers or admin into raising usability.

For the AS it's a given since it's unmaintainable as it is (written in wiki pages) and will be rewritten in Java, taking into account some not currently implemented use cases.

For the stats, yes it would be a good idea too. First we have to assess performances of the stats since a big goal is to make XWiki faster and I've heard plenty of times that stats are disabled because of performance issues so we need to measure that first.

Yup, same impression here. I think moving to another storage engine for stats is required for a "guaranteed" scalability.

...

Maybe also spreading the practice of usability testing would be really useful.

Sure, if you have some process (especially automated) to do that, it would be great.

This cannot be automated, it needs humans to craft useful collections, queries, and evaluate the search results.

From a general POV we're already doing some kind of usability testing by having xwiki open source and releasing often and having users discuss issues on our mailing lists/jira.

I know but this does not employ processes of testing and if these processes could be easily reproduced by others, XWiki we'd be gaining a lot of usability for precise applicatons.

But if you have specific ideas, please shoot, so that we can discuss them :)

I can suggest precision and recall testing at first. An example run with reference to more literature is here: http://direct.hoplahup.net/tmp/Math-Bridge-Evaluations/Test-suite-guidelines... in general, this involves the users to run in some sandboxed environment (e.g. limiting the amount of documents available), to perform a documented sequence of actions, and report their results back from the UI of their actions (e.g. using decorating checkboxes to indicate a correct occurrence or a text-field to request suggestion for supplementary content). This is generally run by domain experts (in this case, it was math teachers, in other cases it would be the company department's document specialist?) which both describe their sandbox first (in communication to the wiki admin) and perform a test sequence agreed upon and provide reports that is sufficiently relevant for developers (local application developers?) to see the situation in which the tester was, and grasp what needs to be changed. Often, as is the case in precision and recall, there is a way to summarize the "quality" as one number, which is always beloved by managements... Some of that can be automated but only in the very end of the process when the platform does not change too much and the tests are somewhat stable. Some of that can also feed into unit testing... with some developers work. paul