Openbravo Design and Development Process/Planning

Overview

The purpose of the planning phase is to review product roadmap and:

• Identify the detailed list of valid feature candidates, either new features or improvements of exinting ones, for the next release. This activity will end up in the creation of the basic input for the "Operational Roadmap".
• Plan design and develoment activities required within engineering teams.

Release planning

The Planning phase of the design and development process consists in determining the feature candidates for a particular release, that is the work to do.

Apart from the corresponding register in the Openbravo tool "issues.openbravo.com" where each feature is briefly defined, more complete specifications will have to be provided by the PM team to the Engineering team responsibles, in other to properly estimate, and therefore shedule the features that will be part of a release by taking also into account engineering resources availability.

The outcome of this process is a fully prioritized list of feature candidates within the release, defining core features first, and then other features ordered by relevance.

Within Openbravo, each feature part of the operational roadmap is then assigned to the corresponding team lead:

• Features concerning Openbravo Commerce Suite will be assigned to the Retail team
• Features concerning to Openbravo technical foundation will be assigned to the Platform team
• Features concerning Openbravo Business Suite will be assigned to the Functional team, including statutory and regulatory requirements for a country.
  • Functional team might drive the implementation of statutory and regulatory requirements for a country through the corresponding "Professional Localizer". For addition information, please review the Openbravo Localization Guide.

From this point on, the corresponding Engineering Team Lead is responsible of the feature assigned by taking "product owner" role.

Product Manager can then detail the feature request initially by requesting input from Openbravo's User Experience, Engineering and QA specialists and merging their feedback with his own understanding into the corresponding Functional specifications that will be uploaded in the Openbravo Roadmap tool, therefore it is available for review and approval.
For additional information on how to properly create a functional specification, please review the Functional Specification Style Guide.

At the same time, feature product owner or whoever product owned decides based on resources availabity, can then technically detail the design required for the funtionality to implement within the corresponding Design Specification.
For additional information on how to properly create design and development documentation, please review the Development Documentation StyleGuide.

Product Owner can split the functional specification once approved, into small chunks of functionality that can be delivered gradually.

The product owner then blends all these gradually deliveries with necessary other ongoing development, refactoring and bugfixing efforts, if any; therefore a "global" solution is provided.
All these actions can also be tracked within Openbravo Roadmap tool, therefore all persons involved in the planning process such as PM and Engineering teams can interact.