Collaborating with Alfresco

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Collaborating with Alfresco

EddieMay
Alfresco Employee
0 4 4,311

We are changing the way we track issues raised by the Alfresco Community. Currently, anyone can either raise issues in Github or the ALF project in JIRA (https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/projects/ALF/summary). Going forward, we will only use Github for externally raised issues and code contributions.

Alfresco is in the process of migrating their on-premise JIRA instance to cloud, and we’re taking this as an opportunity to change the way we collaborate with external contributors. This shouldn’t have any impact on your access as open projects, such as MNT and ALF - these will continue to be available. If a ticket is not marked as internal, you will be able to access it regardless of having an account.

The timeline for the change is October 31st. After that, issues.alfresco.com will be made read-only and eventually decommissioned. The URL for the tickets will change, e.g. https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/MNT-0001 will become https://alfresco.atlassian.net/MNT-0001. Once we finish the migration and back the data up, we will redirect the links to ease the transition.

We realize that we have many repositories on Github and that it can be challenging to identify the correct place to raise issues. To combat this, we have created a new repository “Collaborating with Alfresco” (https://github.com/Alfresco/collaborating-with-alfresco) which serves as a “catch-all”. Raise issues here if you are unsure of the correct repository, and we will route them into the appropriate repository.

These changes are all unimportant if we don’t fix the issues raised in Github. We are working with the delivery teams on how to better visualise, manage and eventually resolve the issues. We are working on boards in Github to show the tickets by product and also on integration between Github and JIRA (we still need the JIRA tickets to get the work done internally).

Finally, we are experimenting with this, so all feedback is welcome.

4 Comments
afaust
Master

So, I realise that the ALF project will remain available in a read-only state after the move to JIRA cloud and switch to using GitHub issues for externally raised tickets. But I have to wonder if that may invite some confusion that could (should?) be avoided.

Members new to the Alfresco community may not be aware of the old JIRA system, look at the project and see a (relatively) empty issue list - some may see this as an indication that the project is not that active / used by other people, or that there is some heavy moderation. This could be solved by always keeping a very prominent notice (in README / GitHub project summary stub listed at the top of the page) that people can and should check the old system to see if an issue was already filed in the past and may have been closed / rejected with a specific / conscious decision not to address issue / bug XZY.

How will non-closed ALF issues be handled? Are they transferred to GitHub issues so that they may remain open for comments / additions, and to allow the use of a single system for tracking "ongoing" community issues? Personally - despite effectively having given up on this avenue of community participation and only filing the most trivial / obvious 2-5% of issues I come across - I currently have around 25 issues reported and open (up to 4 years old), and am not inclined to manually refile them. While it may be a tempting opportunity for engineering managers / VPs to change the process and cut down the (visible) debt of the product in one fell swoop, it could (further) alienate active community members and reduce future participation/engagement. It would be in line with the bad precedent of the "blanket JIRA issue cleanup of 2016" (check for JIRA issues closed as "Won't fix" at the turn of July/August 2016).

EddieMay
Alfresco Employee

Hi @afaust 

Your suggestion re: Github README is really sensible & is the way we're going to go.

Currently we have 117 open issues in ALF. We are not planning a "blanket JIRA issue cleanup of 2016".

The current plan is:

  • To review the 117 open ones to be clear which of them won’t be fixed (some of them are too old and maybe not valid anymore or may be redundant)
  • We are investigating the option to “automatically mirror” the remaining open Jira issues in Github, so that the people who raised the ALF issue won’t need to re-create the issue in github again.
  • Having these open tickets mirrored in Github should avoid the impression of an inactive or heavily moderated project.

 

HTH

mjw
Customer

Are there updates? I can't find an actively used issue tracker for ACS on Github.

amanda_roberts
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi @mjw - I'll chat with the team about this and get back to you with any information I find.

Thanks,

Amanda