By Chris Bradford (@bradfordcp), Jeff Carpenter (@jscarp)

Prioritization and roadmaps are often among the more challenging areas for any open source project to manage. On the K8ssandra project, we’re making some improvements to how we manage our roadmap for new features.

Legacy K8ssandra Roadmap

If you’ve poked around the website a bit, you may have noticed the roadmap page that we’ve been using. This page provides a non-prioritized list of changes proposed by project contributors.

As part of our post-1.0 release cleanup work, we’ve identified that a more flexible, robust approach was needed. We’ve determined that it would be much easier to track the roadmap in Git. The old roadmap page will be available for a short time but eventually phased out.

New Roadmap

The new roadmap is implemented as a GitHub project under the K8ssandra organization. The roadmap is broken out by quarter, with a lane for each of the next 4 quarters. In addition, there is a lane for other items that, while important, are not yet prioritized. Currently, each item in this list is a “note”, which boils down to a single text field. Over the coming days, these will be transitioned into issues within the roadmap repository which allow for richer integration with related resources inside Github (milestones, labels, etc) and a cleaner UI.

Chris Bradford shared a quick overview of this new roadmap at the most recent meeting of the Cassandra Kubernetes Special Interest Group (SIG). You can see the video here:

Going forward, we hope to use this roadmap to manage our work. We’ll define epics that span repository boundaries.

We’d love to have your feedback on the items in the project and their prioritization, as well as any refinements to how we review and document changes.