Project Foundation Stages

The development of Wikijump should follow the deployment plan, or the ill-defined lack of a final state will result in endless development without a serious feeling of progress towards migration or effective prioritization.

This plan devises “stages”, which are groupings of releases which are targeted towards bringing the platform to a particular state. When a set of requirements are met, a stage can begin, and a set of changes in access patterns and platform migration can take place.

There are a number of features which are already full or partially implemented in the project, but are not currently expressed in the UI or usable. The goal of this setup is to organize remaining necessary work in such a way that higher priority items are focused on, and that there is centralized tracking for filling in missing holes throughout the project.

Each stage’s “requirements” section lists the code changes that need to occur in order for that stage to be completed, and the “platform” sections lists all non-code changes, such as policy that needs to be written.

Please note that later stages are more likely to be incomplete as planning the exact scope of what makes sense to achieve there cannot be properly known until the project itself is closer to that point in time.

Stage 0 (Trial)

This is the first project stage. It is primarily a label rather than a deployment target, but will be notable for having an associated announcement. The announcement post will explain this plan and how we intended to roll out each stage and the associated deployment steps.

At the time of creation for this document, almost all the requirements here were already met. So, this stage is primarily about organizing, cleaning things up, and finishing up ongoing work into a release-ready state.

Requirements

Stage 1 (Foundations)

This project stage is marked by having a more complete set of actions available on users and pages, but which is overall still very non-comprehensive. This will also be the start of basic settings panels, which are expected to be in flux until designs and requirements stabilize. And, the foundations of solid internationalization support should be ensured.

Like with the Pre-Alpha stage (and every stage after), there will be an associated announcement.

Requirements

Platform

Stage 2 (Early)

This project stage is marked by having a more complete basic feature set. Most core operations on Wikidot are supported, and the project has a sufficient base to enable future changes to be made. This will be a longer stage than Stage 1, and marks the transition to larger stages with periodic intermediate releases.

Requirements

Platform

Stage 3 (Access Alpha)

This project stage will be the first large stage, and is marked by implementing most of Wikidot’s primary feature set.

Requirements

Platform

Stage 4 (Access Beta)

This will also be a large stage, and is primarily marked by interactions and dialogue with users to understand needs and prioritize and fix platform shortcomings. There will not be a stable “production” during this time, instead it will be used to ensure that users are able to perform the work they are accustomed to.

Requirements:

Platform

Stage 5 (Migration Alpha)

At this point, the platform should be stable and able to host general functions. So starting here, the effort will be on beginning the migration period for the new platform. That is, when Wikidot sites start moving over for real to use Wikijump as their new permanent home. It is expected that this will come with a number of operational and logistical difficulties, so it will start with smaller sites and those with fewer requirements. The stage will be marked with dialogue and work with these early platforms to ensure their workflows and needs are accounted for.

Requirements

Platform

Stage 6 (Migration Beta)

After all the early issues have been worked out, this release stage will be the bulk of the migration effort. Most of the large and heavily used sites will be migrated during this stage, and there will be a significant but gradual period as the bulk of Wikidot site activity begins moving over.

Requirements

Platform

Stage 7 (Migration Done)

This stage consists of the remaining sites being migrated, after most of the issues have been resolved and continued movements are incremental. Focus will be on cleanup, preparing for the Delta period, and ensuring that all of the site participants are safely off of Wikidot without any remaining data.

Requirements

Platform

Stage 8 (Stability)

Here, we work to pay down collected bug and operational issues, and determine priority for new feature work. Following this point, a new release system should be decided on to track continued development and migration work. For instance, a month-duration sprint system could be put in place in Jira to group each set of changes.

Platform