In the introductory post to the Magento developer blog, Ben Marks mentioned a number of developer-focused initiatives which we are implementing this year. Rather than keep you all guessing, I'd like to share our roadmap for these initiatives.
- Magento 2 DevBox Beta
Please see Alan Kent's latest blog post regarding our official resource for Magento development environments.
- Quality Focus
We continue to make significant investments in imroving our quality footprint. This investment bears fast fruit in the form of a modern, socialized, and ratified automation framework (MTF) delivered first to our internal organization, followed almost immediately by a launch to our community. We are putting the best tools forward so that every contributor, whether you are a Magento employee, a Technology Partner or a Solution Partner, can deploy with confidence across a variety of system and extension configurations. We will always have manual oversight of the testing process, but our automation initiatives will enable us to scale to the demands of tomorrow.
These steps, in combination with a dedicated release management role, mean we will be delivering Magento 2.0.x and 2.1.x updates on a regular basis to enhance the development experience and enable you to quickly deliver on customer requirements.
- GitHub Community Votes
We've closed 500+ verified GitHub issues so far. To date we've relied on our experience, the experience of partners & merchants, as well as dialogue on GitHub to help us prioritize issues. Starting soon we will be using issue upvotes as a distinct weighting criterion, and we encourage the community to weigh in using this efficient "+1" style of voting.
- GitHub Community Moderator Team
Max Yekaterynenko, Director of Community Engineering, will be rebooting and ramping up a new team of community moderators (If you aren't familiar with this initiative, please refer to this May 2015 post from Ben Marks's blog.). While the members of the 2017 team have yet to be selected, we have a clear idea regarding expanded capability and scope. In addition to issue triaging, GitHub Community Moderator team members will be given direct access to the core development team and our expanding testing toolset in order to assess issues, solicit resolutions, and process pull requests. Max has assembled a strong team of engineers and architects to facilitate ecosystem participation.
- DevDocs Enhancements
We are continuing the DevDocs redesign work that started in Q4 2016. Changes will include adding new content and restructuring much of the existing content so it is easier to find the information you need. We will also be hosting documentation sprints at Meet Magento events and another pre-Imagine Docathon, to enhance content on topics you care about the most.
We will share more about the timeframe for each initiative as they move closer to completion.
