It’s the big elephant in the room: Joomla lacks a reliable long term roadmap for it’s CMS product. Additions to new versions have been primarily driven by personal preferences of individual contributors and not by a long term strategy - and finally, it’s time for that issue to be solved.
In order to do so, a group of people gathered in a rural village in southern Germany in early September to answer the big question: where should Joomla head to?
The Arrival
Day 0, and there were a lot of questions: did we select the right people? How is the location? But this will come later. First we all had to arrive at the location and get to know each other.
So we decided to go together to a local restaurant and start the first introduction round. We had some great talks and you could feel the excitement and motivation from everyone. This was a promising start, especially when later in the evening first conceptions and ideas were discussed and noted down.
We were ready to kick off.
Day 1 - Expectation Management
After an early breakfast, the day could begin. The first challenge we had was to align the different expectations. Every attendee had different ideas about the outcome of the sprint and the questions that shall be answered in the next couple of days. Also from the first evening it was very obvious that many ideas were flowing around what now should happen at this sprint. So how do you get everyone on the same page? And are we covering all aspects of target groups?
So we did a quick intro to test the water. How do we see the future of Joomla!, who are we and with which target group are we working with? It looked very wide-spread, which is a perfect foundation for such a sprint: it makes sure that different perspectives and needs are considered.
So next we need a common understanding of where Joomla! stands, what are the strengths, the weaknesses, are there opportunities we could seize and which threats are out there? This sounds like a typical S-W-O-T-model. So we started here with three teams, a kind of a brainstorming round to collect the different aspects.
The result was extensive … and unorganized. Much more than we could tackle in one weekend. The result was also very mixed up containing product entries (for them we made this production sprint) and project issues (we’ll talk later about them). So first we put all the project issues aside for now and focused on the product entries. We’re a big fan of swarm intelligence, so everyone could vote on their top 3 entries per category (S-W-O-T), so we got a clear view, what were the top priorities we should look at first.
Additionally several entries were duplicates which we could eliminate and some others could be grouped together as they touched a similar topic.
Finally we had a common understanding of what the focus points for this sprint are.
Having this nice overview, we had a short snack break with different discussions going on.
Now knowing the theoretical part, what needs to be solved, we wanted to find ideas on how to solve them. That means, what needs to be changed in Joomla to strengthen the strengths, overcome the weaknesses, take on the opportunities and avoid the threats. For this step we used the so-called “Blue Ocean Strategy” to find the sweet spots.
This is an easy way to find areas where to improve, add, remove or save energy in the development of Joomla!. Although “Blue Ocean” has some flaws, it gives very quickly a common overview and supports brainstorming. So new groups were built and the task was tackled.
This gave us now a list of features which should be integrated to improve Joomla! And make it future ready. So we grouped them and … ran out of time.
We promised to have a check-in with the community at 3pm UTC, so we prepared a small presentation and joined in. Lessons learned: it’s not easy to include people in an online call when you have an offline event, if you don’t prepare a few hours before. So after the session, especially David & Sigrid sat down for a few hours to evaluate how we can integrate the community in a better way which led to a rating system about four criteria:
- Competitive advantage
- Benefit for Joomla! target audience
- Ease of implementation
- Backwards compatibility risks
Now we were looking for some direct and helpful feedback from the community and something we could work with. Meanwhile, we let the evening come to an end by having pizza & some fun.
Day 2 - Priorisation & Evaluating
After another great breakfast, we started into the second day. Having the rating system created the day before, David moderated detailed rounds of “Planning Poker” to get a common understanding of each feature. This took several hours, and was done in a very constructive atmosphere with heavy discussions. At the end everyone filled out the rating form too and we got an overall result: the community and the sprint participants as one. To get an even more clear result, we calculated the median for each feature and summed up the result. This had the advantage, that ratings which e.g. scored everything a “1” just because the person didn’t like the feature do not distort the result. So at the end, we had a nice rated list (you can find here - be aware, you can switch the tabs at the bottom to see the detailed rating and the final list). As the plan was not to kill the 3rd party market, again we formed groups and investigated if there are established 3rd party extensions already available, if we have any dependency constraints and also a first time estimation was done.
Now what should we do with the list? We all agreed that we should give the top items more details like a detailed description, also outlining what the feature should not cover. We had to look into the environment, too, if there are any pre-requirements and what is the way to implement it. So the first product sheets were created. After they’re finalized, we plan to get an approval from the board and production and publish them at the developer page as kind of a roadmap. Meanwhile the next presentation for the community was due where we showed the results so far.
After that a long and exhausting day came to an end. Stefan treated us with a great barbecue, which everyone really appreciated. Thank you, Stefan!
Day 3 - Wrap up
Half a day left, we tried to sort out the final things. A few of us finalized the product sheets, while others focused on evaluating the project tasks we moved aside on the first day.
Many new ideas came up, which probably will support an Outreach Department sprint. Also stuff for the board was discussed and noted down by Sigrid.
After a final feedback round and a cleanup of the location, time was over and we ended the sprint with a good spirit.
Participants
Thank you Dimitris, Carst, Arend-Henk, David, Robert, Marco, Harald, Benjamin, Maarten, Laura, Tom, Sigrid, Rachel, Stefan
Conclusion & Next steps
So what’s to say about the sprint? Did it produce a “ready to kickoff”-type of document with detailed planning and todos? Probably not, but the first time after many years an initiative and some kind of long term roadmap was created. For sure the roadmap needs a lot of refining (which happens at the moment), people need to be found helping to implement the ideas (that would be you, as part of the community) and as mentioned before as “Blue Ocean” does not cover all aspects of the world, some additional thoughts and adjustments have to be made. Especially one of the points is that the rating needs some weighting, as a B/C breaking feature does not have to be bad, it just needs to be handled with some consideration and could be a game changer in the future.
We plan to have another meeting within the upcoming two weeks to discuss the next steps and define “feature responsibles” - Joomlers, who take charge of features, being the project managers and contact persons. Also a final strategy should be crafted, approved by the board and the Production Department going forward.
We hope that this sprint is the starting point for the next level of Joomla!, but, guess what, this can’t happen without you: the community. We plan to have more events, where you can directly get involved, making Joomla! better. But there is a lot of work in front of us, so we are currently preparing the results, publishing them asap and we hope that you get involved. Just join us at Mattermost or contact us directly if you’re interested to join.
We had a great bunch of people at the sprint. We learnt, although there were so many different opinions, it’s possible to be together for over three days without fighting and any bad mood. And that is what Joomla! stands for: All together.