[Bf-committers] Understanding the dev process

[Brecht Van Lommel]

I think the main issue recently was that for the first half of the 2.8
project, many changes were made without well-defined use cases and
design, and much code was left incomplete or broken. This left the
second half of the project with the difficult task of solving much
technical debt, with little time left for anything else.

We plan to go to an iterative approach with regular releases, and it's
not easy to predict how that will go after two years of a different
model. There is a risk of getting bogged down in bug fixing and small
changes, without time or confidence to finish bigger things.

Developers should be given time to tackle those bigger projects and
refactors. On the other hand, those projects then also have to be done
in a more disciplined way. That means splitting up projects into
smaller steps. Fully going through the design, implementation,
stabilization and documentation for each step. Developers should be
encouraged to pace themselves so they can take the time to do projects
well, but at the same time keep delivering finished steps even if they
are small, and getting user feedback early.

I have a document with more practical suggestions here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gxuBv6aeZjKgzMQmGYdaERKbd7VnllSa9s_ejl2hMGo/










On Thu, Jul 4, 2019 at 3:38 PM Nathan Letwory <jesterking at letwory.net> wrote:
>
> Hey all,
>
> As you all may know by now I've been asked to help coordinate and manage
> the Blender development.
>
> To get a better understanding of what these days is going on, and to
> prevent me from just acting through my personal preferences, I'd like to
> hear from the blender developer community how they see the current dev
> process.
>
> I'm most interested in finding out how devs perceive the process: what goes
> well, and even more so what causes trouble.
>
> An open discussion by anyone on this topic is of course welcome, but I'd
> like (and also a bit expect) input at least from those who are listed on
> the Modules [1] page.
>
> Cheers!
>
> /Nathan 'jesterKing' Letwory
>
>   [1] https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Modules
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