Roadmap

Process

Read the Docs has adopted the following workflow with regards to how we prioritize our development efforts and where the core development team focuses its time.

Triaging issues

Much of this is already covered in our guide on Contributing to Read the Docs, however to summarize the important pieces:

  • New issues coming in will be triaged, but won’t yet be considered part of our roadmap.
  • If the issue is a valid bug, it will be assigned the Accepted label and will be prioritized, likely on an upcoming point release.
  • If the issues is a feature or improvement, the issue might go through a design decision phase before being accepted and assigned to a milestone. This is a good time to discuss how to address the problem technically. Skipping this phase might result in your PR being blocked, sent back to design decision, or perhaps even discarded. It’s best to be active here before submitting a PR for a feature or improvement.
  • The core team will only work on accepted issues, and will give PR review priority to accepted issues. Pull requests addressing issues that are not on our roadmap are welcome, but we cannot guarantee review response, even for small or easy to review pull requests.

Milestones

We maintain two types of milestones: point release milestones for our upcoming releases, and group milestones, for blocks of work that have priority in the future.

Generally there are 2 or 3 point release milestones lined up. These point releases dictate the issues that core team has discussed as priority already. Core team should not focus on issues outside these milestones as that implies either the issue was not discussed as a priority, or the issue isn’t a priority.

We follow semantic versioning for our release numbering and our point release milestones follow these guidelines. For example, our next release milestones might be 2.8, 2.9, and 3.0. Releases 2.8 and 2.9 will contain bug fix issues and one backwards compatible feature (this dictates the change in minor verison). Release 3.0 will contain bugfixes and at least one backwards incompatible change.

Point release milestones try to remain static, but can shift upwards on a release that included an unexpected feature addition. Sometimes the resulting PR unexpectedly includes changes that dictate a minor version increment though, according to semantic versioning. In this case, the current milestone is closed, future milestones are increased a minor point if necessary, and the remaining milestone issues are migrated to a new milestone for the next upcoming release number.

Group milestones are blocks of work that will have priority in the future, but aren’t included on point releases yet. When the core team does decide to make these milestones a priorty, they will be moved into point release milestones.

Where to contribute

It’s best to pick off an issue from our current point release or group milestones, to ensure your pull request gets attention. You can also feel free to contribute on our Cleanup or Refactoring milestones. Though not a development priority, these issues are generally discrete, easier to jump into than feature development, and we especially appreciate outside contributions here as these milestones are not a place the core team can justify spending time in development currently.

Current roadmap

In addition to the point release milestones currently established, our current roadmap priorities also include:

Admin UX
https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/milestone/16
Search Improvements
https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/milestone/23
YAML File Completion
https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/milestone/28

There are also several milestones that are explicitly not a priority for the core team:

Cleanup
https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/milestone/10
Refactoring
https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/milestone/34

Core team will not be focusing their time on these milestones in development.