Hi
My name is Alex Shirley (aka NukeAlexS) and if you've logged any issues this year in our bug tracker software Gemini, then the chances that I would have been your first point of contact. Right now you are my first point of contact because this is my first blog on this site. Anyway, it's my primary job when you log your issue in Gemini to validate it, decide where best it should be directed at, and how important it is. Once it reaches the core team they re-review what I did (often I get it wrong), and then they attempt the real work of getting the issue resolved.
Back in 2006 I looked at DNN and I felt that whilst it was a great application and fit for purpose (otherwise I wouldn't be using it), there were a large number of outstanding issues that I perceived were not being looked at. I just could not understand why really obvious issues were not being dealt with at all. In the end I posted a strong complaint in the forums, and rather the receive a message of complete indifference, or somebody telling me to stop whinging, I was asked by Shawn Mehaffie to join the QA team and help sort the problem out. I was rather taken aback to be honest, flattered, and in the end I just had to accept.
Moving on... it has been mine and the QA teams priority clean up the outstanding issues in the Gemini core and public projects, so the rest of the core team can do it's job efficiently, it has been a tall order, and right now I think we have a reasonable (but not perfect) picture of what is going on, so it's time to report in.
So it's my pleasure to publish some Dotnetnuke outstanding issue stats for the 4.6.0 release, and I hope this plays a part in making our open source framework more transparent to all of the DNN community. Of course these stats are always available on http://support.dotnetnuke.com, it's just that it's been very much hidden. I will be showing you how to monitor the situation yourself in realtime in a future blog entry, but right now here it is for your consumption:
Outstanding issues in DNN Core Framework 4.6.0 (at launch)
| |
Show Stopper
|
Major
|
Minor
|
Trivial
|
Total
|
PDF Report  |
Bugs 
|
1
|
73
|
104
|
34
|
212
|
|
Tasks 
|
0
|
8
|
34
|
26
|
68
|
|
Enhancements 
|
1
|
100
|
261
|
199
|
561
|
|
New Features 
|
0
|
21
|
55
|
27
|
103
|
|
|
Total
|
2
|
202
|
454
|
286
|
944
|
|
Note that in order to give you a more realistic picture, issues set as require more info are not included in the above statistics. There are 24 require more info issues at present. Also note this is just statistics for the core framework application, sub-project stats are not included .
The PDF report contains detail on the actual issues involved.
As always we aim to get the number of issues down over the course of the next few releases, especially the bugs. Remember though that more often then not, as soon as one issue is fixed then another one is logged - the project never remains static! So if you are an ASP.NET developer perhaps you can help us by submitting code that will help put to bed our outstanding issues (more about how to do this will be in a future blog, but in a nutshell all you need to do is search for an issue in gemini and leave a comment that includes your code).
Please also realise that these are just figures, and in reality we don't actually know the full picture until the issue is resolved. So if you really want to get an idea of just how stable Dotnetnuke is, use it! Remember this is a heavyweight open source framework application, designed to be flexible, that is used by a heck of a lot of people around the world.
Finally I'd like to sign off by saying that 4.6.0 is just one heck of a release, I know people have worked really hard on this one, and our main body of core team members have been extremely active. They all deserve our thanks, and for me it's the best release yet.. so thanks team!