DrupalCon Portland 2013: UX CASE: LOVE AND HATE IN THE ISSUE QUEUE GARDEN
Update: Based on the insightful comments and questions we've received on this proposal, we have decided to switch tracks from 'UX' to 'Community'. The focus is shifted accordingly, away from being about the UX process and more towards the problems we face in the Issue Queue. Yes, we can use 'UX tools' to examine those problems but the emphasis would be to shed light on some improved ways we operate and grow as a community.
In that respect we want to emphasize a couple of key objectives of this proposed session:
We will present a review of the various creative workarounds that the community has spontaneously invented to solve problems of building Drupal and how they are used.
We will also show how these workarounds might be formalized as designed features to help things move more efficiently.
For reference, here is the original session description:
You may love it or you may hate it, but the fact is that the Issue Queue determines much of the fate of Drupal. Built to report bugs, manage fixes and work on new functionality, it's a hub of discussions around what's needed to be done to make Drupal better.
But is it really working for the Drupal community as a whole? Consider the barrier to entry for community members who don't know how to:
setting up a Drupal dev/test environment
apply patches
understand the technical language
And according to official statistics*, there are around 23,000 developers and almost a million users on drupal.org. That means around 97% of the total Drupal community is locked out of the Walled Issue Queue Garden. [*See mortendk's DrupalCon Sydney session: http://youtu.be/9lcypjtJRj4 at 13:50]
But don't despair. There are some simple things we can do to help bridge these two worlds. We'll present a UX review of the Issue Queue and look at some of the creative workarounds that people have adopted to try make it work a bit better for them. We can learn from this community creativity and amplify it into an organized strategy for integrating everyone's points of view.
The Issue Queue worked well in its day. But it's the end of the development trail. Now we've grown in size and in our range of community perspectives. Let's look at ways to get these new inputs into the mix early in the cycle before the gaps turn into an exploding bug list that drains our developers' time.
Update: We've submitted a proposal for a Core Conversation as a follow up to this session. See "UX Roadmap to the Issue Queue Revolution"
In that respect we want to emphasize a couple of key objectives of this proposed session:
We will present a review of the various creative workarounds that the community has spontaneously invented to solve problems of building Drupal and how they are used.
We will also show how these workarounds might be formalized as designed features to help things move more efficiently.
For reference, here is the original session description:
You may love it or you may hate it, but the fact is that the Issue Queue determines much of the fate of Drupal. Built to report bugs, manage fixes and work on new functionality, it's a hub of discussions around what's needed to be done to make Drupal better.
But is it really working for the Drupal community as a whole? Consider the barrier to entry for community members who don't know how to:
setting up a Drupal dev/test environment
apply patches
understand the technical language
And according to official statistics*, there are around 23,000 developers and almost a million users on drupal.org. That means around 97% of the total Drupal community is locked out of the Walled Issue Queue Garden. [*See mortendk's DrupalCon Sydney session: http://youtu.be/9lcypjtJRj4 at 13:50]
But don't despair. There are some simple things we can do to help bridge these two worlds. We'll present a UX review of the Issue Queue and look at some of the creative workarounds that people have adopted to try make it work a bit better for them. We can learn from this community creativity and amplify it into an organized strategy for integrating everyone's points of view.
The Issue Queue worked well in its day. But it's the end of the development trail. Now we've grown in size and in our range of community perspectives. Let's look at ways to get these new inputs into the mix early in the cycle before the gaps turn into an exploding bug list that drains our developers' time.
Update: We've submitted a proposal for a Core Conversation as a follow up to this session. See "UX Roadmap to the Issue Queue Revolution"