Storj Open Development -Part 2

March 31, 2022

In October 2021, Storj announced we were going to adopt an open development strategy for the storage node development efforts. The goal was to enable our community—and the wider open source community—to contribute to the development of the network. We started this effort by moving all node issues to the storj Github repo and creating a public GitHub project to track them. This allows anyone in the community to look at current and past issues, add comments, make code contributions, or open new issues.

Over the last six months, our engineering and product teams have been adopting this open development strategy for all our efforts. Our teams have moved from private Jira tickets to Github issues/projects to create more transparency with what we are working on and allow the community to make contributions.

In addition, we have made the Storj Network product road map public. The product road map is a high-level overview of the features and functionality we plan on implementing over the next nine - twelve months. It is constantly evolving as we gain more input and insights from our customers and community, so keep in mind road map items are subject to change.

As a part of this open development initiative, before starting development the product team will now make product requirements documents (PRD) public, describing the problem/challenge we intend to solve for our customers. The engineering team uses the PRD to create a blueprint on how we intend to implement the functionality, and our QA team will develop a test plan. Through each of these steps, the documents will be published in our GitHub repositories where reviews and input from our community and customers are welcome and very much appreciated.

As you take a look at the road map you will find the description of each issue will contain some of the following:

  • Summary

  • Pain points

  • Intended outcome

  • How will it work

  • ​​Success metrics

  • Links:

Each issue will have a number of different attributes as well:

  • Repository: The Github repository that the issue lives in.

  • Status: Indicates the progress of an issue

    • Not started - Issue is waiting to be started on

    • On track - Issue is being actively worked on

    • Low risk - Issue is at low risk of not being completed by the estimated completion quarter

    • High risk - Issue is at high risk of not being completed by the estimated completion quarter

    • Completed - We have finished the issue and it's been deployed into production

  • Labels: Indicates what areas of the network will be affected

    • Uplink

    • Satellite

    • Gateway MT

    • Node

    • Link sharing

  • Team: Indicates which of the Storj Labs engineering teams will be working on the issue

  • Objective: Indicates which of the Storj Labs internal 2022 objectives the issue aligns with

    • Be enterprise grade

    • Delight current customers

    • Build for future

  • Estimated completion quarter: Indicates which quarter we believe the issue will be completed and deployed in.

  • Estimated completion sprint: Indicates which sprint we believe the issue will be completed and deployed in. Issues that have not been started yet or are further than a quarter out, may not have this granular info added.

  • Original OKR name: A field we use internally to track how road map issues compare to our original planning sessions and ideas.

  • OKR target quarter: A field we use internally to track what quarter we thought we could accomplish the issue vs when it was actually delivered.

Team boards

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TLDR:

We launched our open development strategy in October and have been making significant progress. Six months later, check out some of our initiatives:

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