[Cosmo-dev] Cosmo planning status

[Ted Leung]

On Thursday a number of us got to together to discuss some of the  
items from the Cosmo Sticky Plan: <http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/ 
view/Journal/CosmoStickiePlanning20060828>.

=== Sticky plans and items in Cosmo

Sheila, Priscilla, and I had tried to map the sticky plan items onto  
rough time frames in order to get some idea of whether all the things  
on the plan could be done in time for the first Preview release.  The  
big question mark item was the section of the plan labeled " Work  
items to support more than just events".

The point of our discussion on Thursday was to try to see if we could  
refine some of the detail in that section of the plan.   The  
conclusion that we arrived at is that the set of stickies in the  
table is probably the wrong set of stickies, and that many of us are  
using the same words to mean different concepts and features.    As  
result of that conclusion,  Sheila, Priscilla, and Mimi are going to  
work up a set of wireframe to clarify the end user visible features/ 
behaviors for general item support.   Once they do that, we will have  
a technical discussion based on those wireframes as a reference.    
Part of the outcome of that discussion should be a better idea of how  
long it might take to do general item support and how we might  
usefully slice that functionality up and deliver it in stages

=== Changes to releases and release planning.

As part of our discussion of the sticky plan, we also came to the  
conclusion that the set of work around the "universal url" feature is  
larger than we have planned for 0.5.   This feature is the key  
feature for the casual collaborator workflow.    We've already missed  
the feature freeze for Chandler 0.7a4, which means that even if we  
got universal url into Cosmo, people wouldn't be able to use it  
effectively because the requisite support is missing from  
Chandler.    So we are going to push that set of features, along with  
the timezone infrastructure work, out into the next release beyond  
0.5, and try to finish up the work on 0.5 as quickly as possible and  
have a release soon.

My understanding of the remaining work for 0.5 is:

* Getting all of the functional tests to pass - Brian is working on this
* Managing events / read-write recurrences - Bobby is working on  
this, Matthew will have some UI work to do, and we will need design  
input on that UI from Priscilla
* Travis is going to try to get some extended logging support for  
Jared into this release as well

Once those features are done, we will cut a 0.5 release.   Given  
Brian's note today on the 0.5 regressions, we're looking at end of  
next week at the earliest.   Matthew and Bobby can comment on the  
amount of time that they think they'll need.

It has been 3 months since we had a Cosmo release, and there was  
agreement in the meeting that we would like to have Cosmo releases  
more frequently, ideally every 4-6 weeks.    I think that this is  
good and achievable goal, and we will be looking at improving our  
process so that process concerns are not preventing us from reducing  
our cycle time.

In order to get back into sync with our Preview goals, the next  
release, 0.6, should focus on two major items (there will be others,  
but these are the key ones)

1. Support for the Casual Collaborator Workflows - that mostly means  
universal URL support
2. Starting work on implementing the new Sharing Format that has been  
discussed  - we will need to sync this work with the corresponding  
work in Chandler 0.7a5.

Folks who were in the meeting, please clarify or correct as you see  
fit.   As always, feedback is welcome.

Ted