Feature requests the roadmap and managing expectations

Background

Archi has been in development since 2010. There are two main developers - Phil Beauvoir and J-B Sarrodie. Phil does most of the actual coding and development, while J-B is product manager, Archi evangelist, contributor and advisor. J-B is also the chair of the ArchiMate Forum.

Effectively this means that new features and bug fixes are implemented by Phil. Phil works on Archi, coArchi, coArchi 2, jArchi and all of the maintenance and build tasks associated with these projects.

Roadmap

A lot of time is spent on maintenance tasks to do with build and release engineering, support, forum maintenance, bug fixing and so on. It might be surprising but that takes a lot of time. Archi is built on the Eclipse platform which itself requires a lot of maintenance and bug fixing from end users and developers. Phil is an Eclipse committer and he spends a lot of time reporting and fixing Eclipse issues. If he didn't do this Archi would not work at all.

And so what about the roadmap? Well, there is no defined roadmap other than what one person (Phil) can work on at any one time given all of the other tasks maintaining Archi. Having said that, what is Phil working on right now?

• coArchi 2
• Supporting the next version of Eclipse as the foundation framework for Archi
• jArchi features
• Bug fixes
• Maintenance

But what about my feature request?

There are several feature requests in the Issue Tracker. Given the above, it's unlikely that some of those feature requests will be implemented, unless someone else is willing to do so and submit a pull request.

• If a feature request is not too onerous and would benefit the majority of Archi users (and if Phil has time for it), it may get implemented depending on workload.

• Have you considered that it might be possible to implement your feature request using jArchi, the scripting plug-in?

• At the end of the day, Archi (and its plug-ins) is free and open source. This gives the user the freedom to implement the feature themselves.

Please note that replies to feature requests in the issue tracker along the lines of "Any update on this?" or "Our stakeholders need this feature now!" will be responded to with a link to this wiki page.