Openbravo Design and Development Process/Product Roadmap Definition

Introduction

The purpose of this stage is to collect market and customers (end-users) functional requirements, including generic and mandatory statutory and regulatory requirements, into the Openbravo Roadmap.

Openbravo product roadmap is intented to reflect Openbravo product vision that is based on:

• what our market claims, therefore our objective is to offer the preferred Commerce & ERP Platform for business where technological diruption is rapidly changing today's business paradigm.
• what we think it should be our value proposition, therefore our objective is to offer the preferred commerce solution for agile retailers as our retail solutions are based on an integrated, scalable and easily customizable and extendible platform.
• what we think it should be refactor to meet Openbravo standards or best code practices, which Openbravo is commited to implement.

Roadmap structure and evolution

Openbravo product roadmap is structured according to the following levels:

• Maturing Roadmap: Covers all released features that have not reached Confirmed Stable (CS) status yet
• Operational Roadmap: Covers the ongoing release in the development cycle. It includes detailed Features and design improvements with an accurate effort estimate. This roadmap is committed in time
• Short Term (ST) Roadmap: Covers next release after the Operational Roadmap. It includes detailed features and design improvements with a high level effort estimate. This roadmap is very probable to happen but is not fully committed in time
• Mid Term (MT) Roadmap: Covers next two releases after the Short Term Roadmap. It includes a list of features with an explanatory description and possibly, yet not always, a high level effort estimate. This roadmap is indicative and may be adjusted at sole discretion of Openbravo
• Long Term (LT) Roadmap: Covers development priorities as of the next year. It includes a tentatively prioritized list of Features (with a scope definition) and Themes, generally with a low level of detail. There is a complete functional map available to facilitate collaboration and alignment

Openbravo maintains and continuously updates a complete functional map with 600+ features defined.

The roadmap evolves based on feedback from our Target Market as Openbravo works closely with a select group of Partners on roadmap evolution through the Openbravo Product Committee:

• this Product Committee is open to selected Partners by invitation only
• the Product Committee has quarterly meetings to review the roadmap updates
• to secure adequate market input is taken into account, feedback from official Openbravo partners is gathered on a continuous basis through the designated communication channels

Roadmap communication

Openbravo communicates the committed roadmap or "Operational Roadmap", ahead of the start of each quater release as described below:

• First month of each quarter a new version of the "Operational Roadmap" will be published
• In each communication of the committed roadmap ahead of the start of each quarter release, updates in the functional requirements are also made available.

Each quarterly roadmap is frozen once it is planned and published, therefore no changes will be made to the committed operational roadmap, as shown in the image below.

For additional information about Openbravo quarterly release, please review Launch stage.

Roadmap managament

Openbravo product roadmap is managed in a tool named Aha. This tool allows to define the roadmap, set timelines, define the work to do and collect feedback.

Openbravo roadmap tool has long term or strategical stand point views, together with operation views, engineering team uses within design and development process:

• Release Overview shows when we are within the corresponding release cycle, as shown in the image below. For instace, dated on November 2018, 18Q1 quarterly release Q&A activities are executed at the same time 19Q1 quarterly release development activities are executed.
  
  
• Feature List view shows the list of features of the roadmap planned for a specific quartely release, once filtered.
  .

Besides, the feature list view allows different teams to track:

• the status of the feature
• the release it is assigned to
• the feature type that is being implemented
• the master feature it is related, if applicable
• the registers that allow to track that design and development activities such as reviews, verification and creation of the documentation required have been properly executed. For instance:
  • every time that a new feature needs to be implemented a register needs to be created in the Openbravo tool "issues.openbravo.com" (for instance: FR37673). This tool allows to:
    • briefly describe the feature to implement so design and development activities can high-level be estimated.
    • link code changes pushed in the corresponding code repository during Construction phase.
  • every time that a new feature needs to be implemented a register needs to be created either in Google Docs or in the Openbravo tool "wiki.openbravo.com",
    as the way to create and properly manage desing, functional, test plan and user documents, as shown in the image below.
    
  • feature implementation could require specific actions such as add a feature to a release phase or link it to another record. Such actions can be executed in this tool.