Hi devs,
We need to harmonize and synchronize on how we fill the “Importance” field for Release note changes.
This field is primarily used when generating reports (it was coded for this at least), so that users could generate reports to see for example only “high” importance changes, or only “high” and “medium” ones, etc.
What’s important in the end is not to drown high importance changes with low importance changes when the user is asking a report about high importance changes.
To give an example, this is a report for high and medium changes:
The issues I see:
- Pinned Pages (high for me)
- Quick Icon insertion (high for me)
- Keyboard navigation for the lightbox (medium or low for me - slightly more low than medium)
- Visual aspects of buttons (low for me)
In other words, for me the importance is about the novelty it brings to XWiki with something like the following for Users and Admins:
- New feature = high
- Feature improvement = medium (or high depending on the improvement)
- Small L&F/UI changes = low (I mention “small” since obviously if we provide a new skin for example, that would be “high” importance change)
- Small non-UI changes = low
For developers, it’s a bit harder but we could imagine:
- new api or new feature for devs = high
- new UI widget/UI component = high
- improved api/widget/component = medium
- small api changes or “obscure” api changes = low
This is what I’ve tried to do over the years and I’ve updated a lot of release note changes accordingly.
For others (Lucas for ex), I’ve learnt that the importance is based on how many users will be affected by it. So a small change of 1 pixel change of a button size for example would affect everyone and would be “high”, while a large new feature targeted only to advanced users (a minority) would be “low”. Note that this is almost already taken into account by the “Target Audience” which has User, Admin and Developer values. The only part potentially missing is “advanced user” vs “simple user”, but I personally don’t think we need it (and there are few changes only for advanced users, and it’s good that simple users know that they exist IMO).
Also note that we have categories, so if a user wanted to see all changes related to accessibility, they could filter on it (I haven’t checked if the WCAG-relaetd changes have been properly categorized as “accessibility” or not).
Another idea to discuss would be to reduce the importance levels we have from 3 to 2 and keep only high and low. I always have a hard time choosing medium and I don’t really see an important use case for medium in reports, so I’d be in favor of simplifying to only 2 levels to make it simpler to categorize.
In order to see what I mean, you can use for example:
- 15.x cycle change: https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/XWiki15CycleReleaseNotes (note that I have already reclassified a lot of change request last year to make the report a bit homogeneous)
- 16.x:
- High: https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleaseNotes/Code/Report?action=report&displayer=grid&products=XWiki&versions=16.%25&categories=&audience=&importance=High
- Medium: https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleaseNotes/Code/Report?action=report&displayer=grid&products=XWiki&versions=16.%25&categories=&audience=&importance=Medium
- Low: https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleaseNotes/Code/Report?action=report&displayer=grid&products=XWiki&versions=16.%25&categories=&audience=&importance=Low
WDYT?
Thanks
Reminder: the custom report generator is available at https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleaseNotes/#HCustomReports
PS: I need to fix the grid layout view to display videos, it seems they aren’t displayed ATM.
), so without an indication and experience on how this field was used I went with a classification which would allow the most importance ordering in between the changes I made. I failed to see the bigger picture here.