[Junit-devel] Feature prioritization in JUnit

[David S. <da...@sa...>]

All,

For the last six weeks, I've been on paternity leave, which brought forward
progress on JUnit to an even slower crawl than usual.  In starting back up,
we recently received a helpful mail that challenged us to think harder about
our community responsiveness.  Even when we're at full productivity, there's
never been more active committers on JUnit than you could count on one hand,
and usually (including now), that hand could be missing most of its fingers.
We want the feature requests to continue, and even to accelerate, but we are
unlikely to implement feature requests at the speed that they are proposed.
Our practice with JUnit has always been to grow it slowly, adding features
only when they are obviously widely useful. Therefore, we should make clear
how your favorite feature request or patch can be among the few that get
implemented, integrated, and released.

>From here on, you can assume that we will be pulling work from the github
issues list at http://github.com/KentBeck/junit/issues.  We will generally
be pulling from the top of one of three stacks:

1) All bugs, sorted by votes:
   - http://github.com/KentBeck/junit/issues/labels/bug#sort=votes
2) All issues, sorted by votes:
  - http://github.com/KentBeck/junit/issues#sort=votes
3) All issues, sorted by priority (where priority is set by the development
team)
   - http://github.com/KentBeck/junit/issues#list

If your issue is at the top of one of those stacks, and you don't hear from
us for a couple weeks, please bug us to find out what's going on.

If your issue is _not_ at the top of one of those stacks, and you really
think it should be, it's time for some politicking.  You can convince the
development team that your issue is more important than our current top
priority, or you can convince the community to vote up your issue.

We appreciate issues that are solved by already-written patches, but we will
not necessarily prioritize a low-vote issue with a patch over a highly-voted
issue with no patch. Even if you submit a patch (with tests, naturally, and
please follow our coding conventions), we are unlikely to integrate it
unchanged. We say this because we never have incorporated a patch unchanged
in 12 years of development.

Thanks for your continued community support.  We love the programming, but
you help make it fun for us,

  David