How should the platform road map be prioritized?

A few weeks ago, we had a good conversation on a Developers Forum about the Platform Technical Road Map (Objective 1.1). If you haven’t seen already, you can review notes on the wiki page for the 2016-08-18 Developers Forum.

During the call, I asked a series of questions, some of which were provocative to stimulate conversation. I’m bringing these questions into Talk and look forward to your thoughts & feedback.

How should the platform road map be prioritized?

Here’s feedback from the dev forum:

  • Have guidelines that let developers & implementations know how things get prioritized
    • We should be more honest, and make sure people actually know that mostly things are not prioritized in any intentional way
  • Clarify how legacy versions are supported
    • Help describe how anyone in the community can backport a feature to an earlier version (including what is or what is not appropriate for backporting)
  • Explicit product architecture team (mix of developers/BAs/PMs/SMEs/Product owners) driving the vision
    • Responsible for balancing all inputs and defining the priorities
    • Generates the priority-ranked backlog of tasks/projects to reach the vision
    • Not responsible for driving day-to-day development
  • Invest in defining/describing projects/features
    • Share these (e.g., via wiki or Talk), allowing volunteers ( individuals or orgs) to take them on
    • Consider having feature-driven releases (i.e., release manager’s job is to get feature X into a release)
  • Separate Platform and Reference Application technical road maps

Related threads…

Who should constitute the OpenMRS Platform architecture Review Board?

Here’s feedback from the dev forum:

  • Representative(s) of Implementer Community (e.g., Jan Flowers)
  • Representatives of users of the Platform
    • Implementer Community (Jan Flowers)
    • Orgs (TW, PIH, Regenstrief, I-TECH, Soldevelo, etc.)
    • Module authors
  • Experts

Do you have additional thoughts/ideas/feedback on the questions above? Please feel free to join the discussion here.

2 Likes

@burke thanks for putting this together! Lots of info here to digest. Is there a “roadmap” to look at per se?