There are 133 merge pull requests on SuiteCRM Github.
They are too many and some very useful as solving problems. There are some talent coders out here (not me!)
But even if some PR do get merged I see others waiting too long without a reason.
We need less backlog on PR so we don’t need to implement 10 or 20 of them by hand so we can avoid several bugs.
I know about your business model and that there are not developer full time committed to the public project. But if you do not set a routine procedure then you will also loose interest from the community of users.
Looking into PR I can see:
Several are too old and will never be merged (some are from 2015). Why not close them and move along?
Many are simple edits, from CSS formating issues, typos or simple fixes. Those should be possible to be merged in no time!
Some are complex or include new features. Those requires more time to be included. But you should have a week goal: each week merge/close at least 2 of them. This would make some users more willing to help!
[color=#000088]What do you need from us? [/color]
Why not implement a system that if 3 users confirmed the PR as solving the issue would make it top of the list to be merged by Salesagility.
You also need to get impact on the community when solving issues.
So lets create a “Merging PR party” on a regular basis, say twice a month? You could set a date and time, people would be present on a chat with a Saleasagility Dev and each PR would have inputs from several users at same time so it gets merged.
The question is… who brings pizza?
I am really pleased that you have raised this up Horus68! We are always conscious of the lack of PRs that are merged into the project and quite simply this it down to resources like you said. Yes we are a business and a percentage of our time is maintaining this, but aside from that we do understand the community’s frustrations. In fact, as we are aware of how large and quickly the community is growing, we have enlisted a full time community manager to oversee the involvement of the public project and the community in the coming months. One of their main goals is to encourage community contributions and their successful implementation into the project and further develop the community to be a thriving resource for SuiteCRM.
However, that is one of the things on the cards from us at SalesAgility, back to the topic on hand! The main reason PRs do not get merged is the lack of resource for testing, and horus68, you’ve hit the nail on the head. If we are able to encourage more community members to test PRs and confirm they work then that would be great. What I would recommend is when users are testing to bear in mind how they are testing i.e. on different browsers, tested other areas of the system like editing records etc. If we can get these test plans up and ready and the community is aware of them I don’t see no reason not to have regular PR blasts. I think for the first couple of these planned runs that it should be limited to a number of community members (which I’ll ask, please enlist if you are interested in this) so we don’t overcrowd and decide by committee – too many cooks spoil the broth.
I think we should simply ask, who in the community would be interested to contribute their time to do SuiteCRM testing?
If you do please reply in this thread and any thoughts you have on this more than happy to hear them.
When I go into PR’s on Github I see a button for “Pull Request Review - add your review”. This let’s me choose between “Comment”, “Approve” or “Request changes”, with a text box to add comments.
I haven’t tried actually using this feature, but what would happen if I (who don’t have any special privileges) approve a PR? Does it count as a vote or something? Or is it just an information, a written opinion, for the SalesAgility employee that will eventually look into that PR?
If any of us decides to test a PR, is that how we signal that it works fine? We do a review choosing “approve”?