Adapt Learning Community: Update on next version of the Adapt framework release

Hi,

I felt it is timely to start a thread about the next release of the Adapt framework and give everyone an overview of where we are at. Our last full release was version 1.1.0 at the end of May 2014. We are now focused on the release of the next release of the Adapt framework.

To answer the first question many of you will have:

When will it be released?

Soon. Sorry to be so vague on this. We have been opening some major cans of worms and it has at times been difficult to get an overview of all the work that needed doing and all of the edge cases that needed considering. Thank you for bearing with us while this work is being carried out.

To remind everyone of the process:

We are currently still developing and one particular issue (soft+hard resets) is still in in the specification stage. While a fair amount of work on this has been done, we found that the code may need refactoring for the best of the stability of the framework.
Once development finishes, we will call a feature freeze and engage in a thorough test cycle. This will include supplying a test package and testing brief to the community. As issues are found and recorded, they will be dealt with as a priority by the core team and anyone who is helping. This part of the cycle lasts for around one month.
The intention of leaving a month for a thorough test cycle is that developers of non-core-bundle plug-ins also have plenty of time to update them so that they work with the new version of the framework. As the number of releases increases, we also strongly encourage developers to supply metadata saying which version of the framework the plug-in works for.
After this period, we make the official release, alongside release notes and documentation. At this point, we'll shout to the world and ask everyone to help us with that and get using the new framework version.

What will be in it?

The scope of official releases is what we call the 'core bundle' - i.e. the core Adapt framework, the CLI and the components and extensions packaged with the standard installation script for the framework. These are currently defined near the top of this document.

At this point, we are working on five big 'buckets'. These are:

WAI AA Accessibility
Right to left (RTL) compatibility (Thanks to the Kineo Israel team for doing this work!)
Overhauled assessment and SCORM tracking (spoor extension) functionality*
Preparation of the framework for compatibility with the authoring tool
Known bugs + any other work done to date

*item number three is proving by far the biggest can of worms and also depends on resolving the soft/hard reset functionality discussed here.

Will this release work with previous version of the framework?

There has been some discussion over what this version should be called. The current thinking of the core team is that it includes many major changes and significant new functionality and should hence be called version 2.0 rather than version 1.2.

As per our standards document, we aim to make this backwards compatible. This means that JSON data for courses using standard Adapt framework v1.1 'core bundle' components should be 'transferrable' to the next (version 2.0) release. 'Transferrable' may include automatic conversion of the JSON data into changed formats (which may mean that the converted data can't then be used with v1.1 anymore). There will more more careful elaboration on this point in the release notes.

Please note backwards compatibility is an aim rather than a promise or guarantee. There are also many scenarios, which will require manual updates when upgrading. For example:

Themes
Non core bundle components (including components classed as 'contrib')
Any customisations

When will the authoring tool be released?

I'm sure this is a burning question for those of you who are following our work here. I'm afraid there isn't a straight forward answer to this at this point but it looks like we're delayed and won't be releasing in 2014 after all. We are currently working on putting up a sandpit of where we have got to, to give the community access and a proper view of progress. We're also working on an assessment of the outstanding work which needs to be done before our v0.1 release and will report back in due course.

I hope this gives you an insight. Please don't hesitate to ask any questions or add comments. And thanks everyone for supporting us.

Sven

Hi Sven,

Thanks for the update. I've been following the development of Adapt quite closely and even built three courses, a custom theme and one plugin which are working well in production. The current state of e-learning development tools is pitiful, and the advent of a modern, standards compatible and fully open source project is brilliant. Kudos to you and the other contributors for your ongoing hard work.

So that brings me on to my feedback: I get the sense that a lot of key discussion and development is happening in private, which makes it difficult to casually keep abreast of things as well as being a barrier to getting involved. For example, I notice on Github a lot of issues are now flagged with references to a private issue tracker, which is somewhat contrary to the open ethos mentioned in the vision statement. Although I think open source works fine with undemocratic decision making (eg. BDFL), for purely practical reasons it would be good to see the technical discussions which are occurring, as well as making it easier to contribute PRs. Just my two pence though :)

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Hi Ben

The private issue tracker we are using is for little more than letting us aggregate the issues from the 22 github repositories that house the framework itself and the various plugins that make up the 'core bundle' into one place.

If we didn't do this it would next to impossible to see how much work we've got to do to actually get the next release out.

It also allows anyone working on the code to log the amount of time they have spent.

Any actual commentary/discussion on an issue should take place on the original github issue, for example: https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt-contrib-text/issues/27

Quite a lot of discussion does take place within a group Skype chat, mainly for expediency's sake. I can only really comment on the framework discussion as that's the one I'm involved in, but big technical decisions are not the general subject in that forum. I don't recall any big technical decisions having been made there...

I agree it should be more open - I believe IRC was tried for quite a while but I think many people struggled with that. I Do you have any suggestions? I suggested Hipchat at one point but this didn't get much traction unfortunately.

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Hi Ben,

We have moved to Atlassian's JIRA to track issues which are core to the direction of the framework and the authoring tool. JIRA makes it easier to manage disparate repositories. Perhaps Mark or Sven can open read-only access to this. I actually didn't realise that it was ever private, so I'm assuming this is an oversight.

We have always been willing to accept pull requests or fixes for GitHub issues. Some developers who are now core contributors have started like this.

Regards,

Brian

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Hi Ben,

thanks - I take your point on board. We are using JIRA (thanks Atlassian for giving us this for free) to manage the core team and this is currently closed. We have discussed and agreed that we would open this up and make it visible publicly but not got around to doing this. The intention is there but it has never happened. I'll see if I can work that out quite quickly.

The other item, which the community can't see are the live Skype chats. We have three of these - one for the Framework, one for the Authoring Tool and one for Design items. We started off trying other IRC clients without much success. Skype seems to have established itself as the tool people used. Maybe we should look at alternatives, which can be opened up as I'm not sure this is possible with Skype. We tried HipChat on Matt Leathes' recommendation recently. This seems to have the ability to make rooms available to the public.

(I've since seen Paul's post as well)

Either way, thanks for feeding back - we're on board with opening up more, just needed this little nudge :-)

I'll update in the near future.

Thanks,
Sven

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Hi,

quick update - I have configured JIRA to be publicly viewable.

I'll highlight these as a permanent links on the main community page in the coming week.

We have recently restarted using JIRA properly so it still needs lots of setup work.

I'll also try and tackle moving to an alternative synchronous chat next week. This may take a little more doing.

Hope this is a positive start!

Thanks,
Sven

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Blimey - thanks for both the comprehensive replies and opening up JIRA so quick. I'm very happy to see my impressions were wrong!

As a follow up suggestion, providing some guidance on where best to get started for newcomers would be helpful - eg. some repos use the "good first bug" label. I'll try and find some time to give something back before Xmas.

Thanks again.

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Hi Ben,

I like the suggestion of 'good first bug' labelling. We'll have a think about this as we're going through the tickets for the next release. I'll post news up here once we have identified them.

All the best and I look forward to you getting stuck in / us helping with that and making it easier.

Sven

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Hi,

Thanks for the update,there's a lot going on and I know there is effort involved in keeping the community up to date, so I appreciate these posts.

I would however like to second Ben's comments about the apparent amount of private development. It doesn't really feel in the spirit of an open source community, in some cases it has led to difficulties in implementing change where we feel there is already changes we can't see. It is also awkward when people see things on youtube and ask us about them and we have to say we don't know how they will work because the source is not available to us. Overall I think this could undermine the value and reputation of the project.

But overall - thanks for the good work, and we continue to support the project.

Paul

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