DrupalCon Portland 2013: D8 LESSONS LEARNED AND HOW WE CAN MAKE D9 BETTER
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 2013-05-23

After a year of "project managing" Drupal 8, I've learned a lot with some fellow PM's who support me on a weekly basis - Ashleigh & Shyamala. I've also started having retrospectives with the team, so it's great to get their direct feedback and share common trends on these projects.

This proposal is essentially a post-mortem for core development from a non-technical perspective. I'd like to share with you my experiences, both good and bad, and ways I think we could do better.

Some basic problems we'll cover are:

- Community disinterest in project management, difficulties we face in planning and organization ("I don't have time", "I don't know where to begin" etc)
- Problems around managing volunteer projects (unreliable deadlines, plannings that aren't, resource issues)
- Problems around managing core projects (lack of visibility into issues, unpredictability and sheer size of the beast)

I also have a vision of how I'd like to see Drupal 9 core development change, and resources are a big part of that. We have a ladder of expertise to climb in order to build and foster adoption of our Drupal releases, and we're missing key rungs.

I hope to share with you my ideas about:

- What we are doing now to solve the build & upgrade issue (how to get people to build & use the next version)
- How we coule organize teams to maximize support for core development
- What we need to build those teams

I think it's an ideal time to brainstorm with people in the room as well during Q&A to make the most of the time as a group.