Reading time: about 4 minutes
A New Team Structure for the Neos Developers
Monday was dedicated to a workshop on the new agile team structure for the Neos project. Gina Steiner facilitated the day, during which we worked together to develop the concept for cross-functional teams, for the communities of practice that connect the teams, and for a council of elders familiar with the project’s vision.
In small groups, we discussed the proposed concepts and further refined the various aspects of the plan. Over the following days, the newly formed transition team facilitated workshops and discussion sessions to address further details of the overall concept. In the coming weeks, two to three teams—each with six to 12 members—will be formed to continuously drive the further development of the Neos project.
To this end, a survey will be conducted within the developer community—we are looking for designers, developers, integrators, marketing experts, and many other talented individuals who can envision working together in a distributed team to continuously tackle various subtasks of the Neos project. As with all agile, cross-functional teams, the composition of the team members is key—all essential skills should be represented within the team. The new teams will also need to fill the roles of “Synchronizer” and “Prioritizer.” The Synchronizer will take on the tasks typically handled by the ScrumMaster in a Scrum team: coordinating team members, establishing a positive team culture, onboarding and integrating new team members, and, of course, facilitating regular meetings. The Prioritizer—similar to the Product Owner in Scrum teams—will work with colleagues from other teams to prioritize project tasks and ensure the quality of the results.
The new structure (detailed here) was adopted unanimously following a vote among the Codesprint participants and the absent members of the previous core team. The new structure will make it possible to better distribute knowledge about the project and the upcoming tasks. We are all very much looking forward to moving Neos forward in this new structure.
Migration to GitHub and Switch to PSR-2
Work has been underway for several weeks now to migrate the Flow and Neos code from git.typo3.org to GitHub. This long-planned migration offers several advantages. The workflow for submitting changes via Gerrit felt cumbersome to many new developers. The GitHub approach, in which changes are sent to the main repository via pull requests, is, by contrast, a well-known concept among developers.
Using the GitHub platform not only provides better visibility into the project’s development but also offers the opportunity to use free open-source services such as the continuous integration tool Travis-CI or CodeClimate for generating code metrics. With the move to GitHub, developers are also no longer required to fill out the TYPO3 Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which further lowers the barrier to entry for newcomers to the Neos community.
With the migration, the components that make up the core of Neos and Flow, respectively, have been consolidated from their previously separate Git repositories into a single Development Collection Git repository for each. Consolidating the Git repositories makes it significantly easier to collaboratively work on changes that affect multiple parts of the core components. Scripts then ensure that the Development Collections are split back into individually installable packages.
Work on the new code contribution guidelines was carried out during the sprint and is still ongoing. Progress can be tracked on discuss.neos.io.
In a vote, the Neos community clearly supported the switch to the widely used PSR-2 coding guideline. This change was implemented during the sprint for all maintained versions of Flow, Neos, and other community-maintained packages.
Planning for the Neos 2.1 Release
The features of Neos Release 2.1 were also discussed during one of the sessions. A list of features was drawn up that are to be completed by the feature freeze for the new version. This list includes the introduction of Workspaces, enhancements and improvements to the content security features, and the stabilization of the History module. In addition, several minor improvements for integrators and editors are on the agenda. These include tooltips and help texts in the Backend as well as further performance improvements to the Backend. The Jira board, where the release is taking shape step by step, can be found here.
There will no longer be a release manager for this release. Instead, the work involved in finalizing the release will be one of the first tasks for one of the new teams.
Would you like to develop professional web applications with Neos?
To make getting started with the Neos CMS easier, we offer various workshops—documented on our blog or as in-person workshops. The workshops are suitable for both beginners and advanced users.
No matter which type of workshop you choose, you’ll always benefit from the expertise of a Neos Core member.
Like every Neos Sprint, this week—and the opportunity to work with such wonderful people and amazing developers—was an absolutely enriching experience for me. I highly recommend that everyone participate in one of the sprints or join one of the new teams.
