Timetable - moving to a predictable release schedule

At the March, 2014 DuraSpace Sponsor Summit in Washington, DC, VIVO sponsors in attendance expressed approval for moving to a regular release schedule as a means of bringing bug fixes and new features into production in a more predictable timeframe.  Early summer and late fall have been selected as release dates to precede summer vacation and winter break periods, when key developers and testers may be unavailable.

The timetable for VIVO 1.7 has been adjusted to fit this paradigm only recently and the release will therefore be modest in scope, focusing primarily on improvements and bug fixes to features introduced in VIVO 1.6, 1.6.1, and 1.6.2, as well as a new integration with the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) application programming interface that will allow researchers to create and/or confirm ORCID iDs from within VIVO (see VIVO-ORCID Integration).

For a longer picture view, see the VIVO Technical Roadmap presentation from the March DuraSpace Sponsor Summit.

What's included?

Documentation for the release is being developed on a different wiki to avoid confusion with current installation and implementation functionality, but will be moved to this space at the time of the release.

Current tasks and progress may be followed at https://jira.duraspace.org, where login credentials are the same as for this wiki – comments and offers for help in testing and documentation are always welcome. To see the highest-ranked issues in the release, click on the word Blocker.

Where did these issues come from, and who decided the priority?

Issues are created as the development team is made aware of them – most often through questions raised on the mailing list, or discussions on the weekly development and implementation calls. Anyone is welcome to request an account for creating and/or commenting on issues, and the JIRA issue tracker is open for public viewing without a login.

Five factors have affected the priorities for VIVO 1.6:

  1. Grant obligations – the VIVO-ORCID grant promised to include creation and confirmation of ORCID iDs in the next VIVO release
  2. Community – we have heard from multiple fronts that as VIVO installations grow in size, performance degrades when editing and with large pages
  3. Coherence – feedback on new features introduced in 1.6 such as the web services API suggests changes that would make them truly useful
  4. Bugs – assessed for priority based on likelihood of occurrence and seriousness  of impact
  5. Resources – the VIVO development team is 1 developer (Jim Blake) with part-time assistance from a few other developers, testers, and documenters – we will run out of time before we run out of tasks

Will VIVO 1.7 require another data migration?

After the major changes introduced with the VIVO-ISF Ontology in VIVO 1.6, we want to avoid changes that would require another data migration in 1.7.  This means that your data ingest processes that have been adjusted for VIVO 1.6 should continue to work for 1.7.

What happens next?

Planning for VIVO 1.8 will start even before the release of 1.7 based on the VIVO Technical Roadmap and community input, and will also be tracked in Jira. Identification of features, requirements gathering, time estimation, and priority ranking will happen via the VIVO working groups under the overall coordination of Layne Johnson, the new VIVO Project Director. The biggest variable will be the amount of development time that can be allocated to the project by the community, either in the context of membership or by direct participation.