Add a draft roadmap doc.

timabbott · Apr 10, 2016 · ec34f29 · lfaraone · Apr 10, 2016 · lfaraone
1 parent fcced95
commit ec34f29
Show file tree

Hide file tree

Showing 2 changed files with 268 additions and 0 deletions.
diff --git a/docs/index.rst b/docs/index.rst
@@ -20,6 +20,7 @@ Contents:
    queuing
    schema-migrations
    front-end-build-process
+   roadmap
 
 Indices and tables
 ==================

diff --git a/docs/roadmap.md b/docs/roadmap.md
@@ -0,0 +1,267 @@
+Zulip 2016 Roadmap
+==================
+
+## Notes on the state of this document
+
+* This is a first draft, developed to get feedback from the Zulip user
+  and developer community on what is important.  If there's something
+  that you think is important but isn't on here, speak up!  The
+  purpose of this document is ultimately to provide you an opportunity
+  to speak up about your ideas for where Zulip should be going.
+
+* The plan is to have ~all the items link to the corresponding bugs in
+  the Zulip bug tracker, as they do in the "Core User Experience"
+  section.  I haven't taken the time to track down all the links (and
+  open issues where one doesn't exist) yet.  I'm also imagining we'll
+  tag the issues in this document with a milestone on GitHub so it's
+  easy to check in on progress as we go.
+
+* This may end up being a living document where we add new things that
+  we realize are important but weren't on here, or it may be something
+  where we generate a new one every N months.  We'll figure that over
+  the coming months.
+
+## Introduction
+
+Zulip has received a great deal of interest and attention since it was
+released as open source software by Dropbox.  That attention has come
+with a lot of active development work from members of the Zulip
+community.  From when Zulip was released as open source in late
+September 2015 through today (mid-April, 2016), over 300 pull requests
+have been submitted to the various Zulip repositories (and over 250
+have been merged!).  The vast majority of these pull requests were
+written by users from all around the Zulip community, making Zulip in
+many ways a community-driven, distributed-development, open source
+project.
+
+In any project, there can be a lot of value in periodically putting
+together a roadmap detailing the major areas where the project is
+hoping to improve.  This can be especially important in an open source
+project like Zulip, since it can help contributors looking for a
+project to focus their efforts.  This roadmap is intended to organize
+a list of the most important improvements that should to be made to
+Zulip in the relatively near future.  We are hoping to set a goal of
+completing most of these improvements in 2016.
+
+This document is not meant to constrain in any way what contributions
+to Zulip will be accepted; instead, it will be used by the Zulip core
+team to prioritize our efforts, measure progress on improving the
+Zulip product, hold ourselves accountable for making Zulip improve
+rapidly, and celebrate members of the community who contribute to
+projects on the roadmap.
+
+If you're someone interested in making a larger contribution to Zulip
+and looking for somewhere to start, this roadmap is the best place to
+look for substantial projects that will definitely be of value to the
+community (if you're looking for a starter project, the bite-size
+project label on GitHub Issues is a great source for those).
+
+Without further ado, below is the (proposed) Zulip 2016 roadmap.
+
+## Burning problems
+
+Our opinion is that the top problem for the Zulip project is the state
+of the mobile apps.  The Android app has started rapid progress thanks
+to a series of contributions by Lisa Neigut of Recurse Center, and we
+believe to be on a good path.  The iOS app has fewer features than
+Android and has more bugs, but more importantly is in need of an
+experienced iOS developer who can drive the project.
+
+## Core User Experience
+
+This category includes important improvements to the core user
+experience that will benefit all users.
+
+* [Add pretty bubbles for recipients in the compose box](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/595)
+* [Finish and merge support for pinning a few important streams](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/285)
+* [Add support for showing "user is typing" notifications](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/150)
+* [Display stream descriptions more prominently](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/164)
+* [Integration inline URL previews](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/406)
+* [Add support for managing uploaded files](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/454)
+* [Improve missed message notifications to make "reply" work nicely](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/612)
+
+## Ease of setup and onboarding issues
+
+This category focuses on issues users experience when installing a new
+Zulip server or  setting up a new Zulip realm.
+
+* [Create a web flow for setting up a new realm (currently, it's a command-line process)](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/260)
+* [Document or better script solution to rabbitmq startup issues](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/465)
+* [Merge a supported Docker in production implementation](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/450)
+* [Add a mechanism for deleting early test messages](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/135)
+
+## Internationalization
+
+The core Zulip UI has been mostly translated into 5 languages;
+however, more work is required to make those translations actually
+displayed in the Zulip UI for the users who would benefit from them.
+
+* [Merge support for using translations in Django templates](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/607)
+* Add text in handlebars templates to translatable string database
+* Add text in error messages to translatable string database
+* Merge support for translating text in handlebars
+* Merge support for translating text in error messages
+
+## User Experience at scale
+
+There are a few parts of the Zulip UI which could benefit from
+overhauls designed around making the user experience nice for large
+teams.
+
+* [Show subscriber counts on streams](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/525)
+* [Make the buddy list work better for large teams](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/236)
+* Make the streams page easier to navigate with 100s of streams
+* [Improve @-mentioning syntax based on stronger unique identifiers](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/374)
+
+## Administration and management
+
+Currently, Zulip has a number of administration features that can be
+controlled only via the command line.
+
+* Make default streams web-configurable
+* Make [realm emoji](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/543) web-configurable
+* Make [realm filters](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/544) web-configurable
+* Enhance the LDAP integration and make it web-configurable
+* Add a SAML integration and make it web-configurable
+* [Improve administrative controls for managing streams](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/425)
+
+## Scalability
+
+Zulip should support 10000 users in a realm and also support being run
+for small realms in resource-constrained environments.
+
+* [Make the Zulip Tornado service support horizontal scaling](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/445)
+* Make presence system scale well to 10000 users in a realm.
+* [Support running queue workers multithreaded in production to
+  decrease minimum memory footprint](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/34)
+
+## Performance
+
+Performance is essential for a communication tool.  While some things
+are already quite good (E.g. narrowing and message sending perf),
+Zulip could definitely use some work on loading more quickly.
+
+* [Migrate to faster jinja2 templating engine](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/620)
+* Optimize the performance of loading the Zulip webapp
+
+## Technology improvements
+
+Zulip should be making use of the best Python/Django tools available.
+
+* [Add support for Zulip running on Python 3](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/256)
+* [Add Python static type-checking to Zulip]()
+* [Add support for changing users' email addresses]()
+* [Automatic thumbnailing of uploaded images](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/432)
+* Upgrade Zulip to use Django 1.10 once it is released.  The patches
+  needed to run Zulip were merged into mainline Django in Django 1.10,
+  so this will mean we don't need to use a fork of Django anymore.
+
+## Technical Debt
+
+While the Zulip server has a great codebase compared to most projects
+of its size, it takes work to keep it that way.
+
+* [Migrate most web routes to REST API](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/611)
+* [Finish purging global variables from the Zulip javascript](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/610)
+* Finish deprecating and remove the pre-REST Zulip /send_message API
+* Split Tornado subsystem into a separate Django app; this should
+  substantially improve the code organization.
+* Clean up clutter in the root of the zulip.git repository
+* Refactor zulip.css to be broken into components
+
+## Deployment and upgrade process
+
+* Retool the way upgrades work to easily support
+  backwards-incompatible upgrades to Python libraries
+* Optimize the static asset building process to make triggering code
+  deploys on git pushes practical again (currently takes over 1m to
+  build static assets even on a very fast machine).
+* [Minimize the downtime required in Zulip upgrade process]()
+
+## Security
+
+* [Add support for 2-factor authentication on all platforms](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/451)
+* [Add a retention policy feature that automatically deletes old messages](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/106)
+* Upgrade every Zulip dependency to a modern version
+* [The LOCAL_UPLOADS_DIR file uploads backend only supports world-readable uploads](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/320)
+* Add support for stronger security controls for uploaded files
+
+## Testing
+
+* Extend Zulip's automated test coverage to include all API endpoints
+* Build automated tests for the client API bindings
+* [Improve the runtime of Zulip's backend test suite](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/441)
+* Use caching to make Travis CI runtimes faster
+* [Add automated tests for the production upgrade process](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/306)
+* [Improve Travis CI "production" test suite to catch more regressions](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/598)
+
+## Development environment
+
+* [Migrate from jslint to eslint](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/535)
+* Decide whether to replace pyflakes linter
+* Figure out a nice upgrade process for Zulip Vagrant VMs
+* Have well-documented process for new contributors for all apps.
+* Continue improving linters and tests to catch common mistakes before
+  code review.
+
+## Documentation
+
+* Significantly expand documentation of the Zulip API and integrating
+  with Zulip.
+* Expand library of documentation on Zulip's feature set.  Currently
+  most documentation is for either developers or system administrators.
+* Expand developer documentation with more tutorials explaining how to do
+  various types of projects.
+* Overhaul new contributor documentation, especially on coding style,
+  to better highlight and teach the important pieces.
+
+## Community
+
+* Setup a Zulip server for the Zulip development community
+* Expand the number of core developers able to do code reviews
+* Expand the number of contributors regularly adding features to Zulip
+
+## Integrations
+
+Integrations are essential to Zulip.  While we currently have a
+reasonably good framework for writing new webhook integrations for
+getting notifications into Zulip, it'd be great to streamline that
+process and make bots that receive messages just as easy to build.
+
+* Build a framework for writing integrations that receive messages
+* Build tools for sending messages from fixtures into Zulip to support
+  taking screenshots for webhook integrations
+
+## Android app
+
+The Zulip Android app is ahead of the iOS app in terms of feature set,
+so this section serves to document the goals for Zulip on mobile.
+
+* [Support using a non-zulip.com server](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-android/issues/1)
+* Support having multiple Zulip realms open simultaneously
+* Support Google authentication with a non-Zulip.com server
+* Build a slick development login page to simplify testing (similar to
+  the development homepage on web)
+* [Improve the compose box to let you see what you're replying to](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-android/issues/8)
+* [Make it easy to compose messages with mentions, emoji, etc.](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-android/issues/11)
+* Display unread counts and improve navigation
+* [Hide messages sent to muted topics](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-android/issues/9)
+* [Fill out documentation to make it easy to get started]()
+
+## iOS app
+
+Most of the projects listed under Android apply here as well, but it's
+worth highlighting some areas where iOS is substantially behind
+Android.  The top priority here is recruiting a lead developer for the
+iOS app.
+
+* iOS app crashes at startup on latest iOS
+* APNS notifications are broken
+
+## Desktop apps
+
+* Desktop app doesn't recover well from entering the wrong Zulip server
+* Support having multiple Zulip realms open simultaneously
+* Migrate platform from QT/webkit to Electron
+* Build an efficient process for testing and releasing new versions of
+  the desktop apps