Plan for November

Plan for November

I'd like to propose the following plan for the remainder of the month. Spend the first half of the month focusing on bug fixes. We currently have over 200 bugs marked for 1.8. This number is growing at a much slower rate than it was a few months ago, but we really need to get this number down. While blockers and criticals are the most important, they're not necessarily the tickets we should be focusing on right now. These tickets are often the hardest to track down and/or the most time consuming to fix. What we should be looking for right now is quantity. So if you can fix ten minor/majors in the same time it takes to fix one or two blockers/criticals, that would be a good compromise right now.

We could then spend the second half of the month focusing on the new plugins planned for 1.8. Jörn has made some really good progress on buttons, menu, and autocomplete. We should spend this time figuring out how well the plugins work, where the holes are and what we need to release a rock solid minimalistic implementation. We can build demos (both functional and real world), write tests, finalize specs, etc. If we can know exactly where we are with each of these plugins and what still needs to be fleshed out both for design and implementation, we'll be in a great position to start the move to trunk.

There are some other areas we need to focus on as well, such as increasing test coverage, getting ready for the new directory structure and core plugins, finalizing the new widget factory, etc. but those things can wait till December. As always, people should be aware of where they can be utilized the best regardless of what the team's main focus is. For example, even while the focus would be on bug fixes during the beginning of the month, Jörn's time will probably be better spent continuing work on autocomplete and menu since that is where he has the most momentum. Likewise, having six or seven people trying to work on implementation for the new plugins at the same time probably won't be the most productive.

Do people have time to devote to this plan? Does anyone have any other suggestions or recommendations? I'd like to try to get the same kind of momentum we had this time last year; we've got a lot of work ahead of us for the 1.8 release.