[Bigbang-dev] Thoughts on plans for future releases

[Sebastian Benthall]

Hello!

Feeling fresh from the 0.2.0 release, I'm thinking about how to keep
momentum. It was, really shockingly, over three years between the first two
releases, and that's really not right. Research [1] has shown that after
three releases, a project is much more likely to be a 'success', not
getting abandoned.

There is also clearly a lot of ways to polish BigBang that are not deeply
technical.
 - We made a lot of progress on the notebooks in the last release, but
there is still lots more to do. For example, there's no reason why we
shouldn't have notebooks demonstrating how to answer each of Corinne's
questions from her recent thread.
 - There's also lots we could do to improve documentation. We should be
publishing the API docs to a website like https://readthedocs.org/
 - We have a few automated tests, but not thorough test coverage. We could
improve that.

I propose we make this kind of polishing work the goal of the next,
*0.2.1* release.
This would be a small patch release on the existing one, with no major
functional changes.

A reason why I'm proposing this is that in my mind, the most urgent big
update needed to BigBang is conversion from Python 2 to Python 3. That will
involve a lot of tweaks across the entire system. Automated test coverage
and good documentation of the existing functionality is important to make
sure we don't lose quality and introduce new bugs when making that upgrade.

What say you?

Thanks for reading,
Seb




[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/internet-success
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