Like most open source projects, Blockstack has created many channels to interact with the community both asynchronously (the forum, github, etc) and in realtime (slack, telegram, meetups, hackathons, etc). We’re experimenting with a practice of posting bi-weekly issue summaries. With this, we wanted to assess a periodic, comprehensive snapshot of reported issues, as a starting point to optimize our engineering cycles by prioritizing the most critical and impactful issues in the community.
We decided to kick this off by first accumulating user feedback through the numerous venues we interact with the community in an open source environment.
Currently, we are categorizing issues in three broad categories:
- bugs and errors under investigation
- prohibitively difficult for users and/or developers
- feature requests
We currently report issues by both developers, users who host blockstack-core nodes and users who do not host nodes, together. Many of the issues currently overlap.
We then decided to address these issues in sprints, reporting on the issues we tackle in each sprint in a public kanban here: https://github.com/orgs/blockstack/projects/29
We always recommend checking the kanban to see what Engineers are working on in regards to user reported issues. The current process for how issues end up in the kanban is as follows:
-
A report of the issues, both outstanding and new from the previous two weeks, will be posted every other week, before the beginning of a new sprint on the forum by Friday 11:59pm EST.
- The goal of this is that it can be read by Engineers before the Monday engineering meetings.
-
Engineers will respond in the forum with issues they are working on. If these are new issues not mentioned previously in the thread, they should elaborate on those issues.
-
After the meeting, the topics posted on in the forum, and any changes based on conversation in the open meetings will be posted in the kanban https://github.com/orgs/blockstack/projects/29, where you can keep track of issues throughout the sprint.
-
A summary of issues fixed in each sprint will be posted the Wednesday after each sprint. Issues resolved in the previous sprint are listed here: Blockstack Bug Fix Sprint in Review - August 15, 2018
As we are focused on addressing the most impactful issues, we anticipate some issues will be addressed across multiple sprints, with the kanban providing support for dedicating Engineering cycles to prioritizing these issues.
We welcome your feedback and review.