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(Project) ILIAS Refinement

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1 Aim of Project

ILIAS has been continuously developed over the past years. For many years, the development was strongly driven by individual features and the intensive commitment of individuals and institutions. In recent years, more and more "large deveplopments" | large projects have found their way into the releases (see the page layout revision, the ILIAS Resource Storage Service, the splitting up of the Test & Assessment or the page editor revision).
But there are also many other great topics around accessibility, security, performance, GDPR conformity and more.

For ILIAS 8, 9 and also for ILIAS 10 we would like to focus on closing old known problems.
We would like to dedicate ourselves to the reconstruction and final processing of open bug reports in ILIAS 6, 5.4 and 5.3.
We assume that many of them still occur in ILIAS 7 and 8 and cause problems.
In addition, concept gaps are to be identified, clustered and worked on in this process. Certainly no great leaps, but quality assurance and enhancement.

2 Involved Maintainers and Stakeholders

3 Timeline, Findings and Status

November 2021 – August 2022

  • Definition of Target, Design for Work Process, Testrun on various Components
  • Elaborate the overall Project Scope
    • We investigated almost all reported issues under 5.4. 
    • Many issues below 5.3.99 were given to reporters and selected issues were also investigated.
  • Effort Estimation vs. existing Quantity of Mantis Issues

June 2022 – ongoing

  • Commissioning of Developers and Maintainers to fix Issues in ILIAS 8 and Trunk – partly also in ILIAS 7
  • Prioritisation of Issues
  • Fixing Issues

March 2023 – February 2024

  • We will investigated the reported Issues of ILIAS 6 – as soon as the Release is out of Maintenace
  • Fixing should be focused on ILIAS 8 and trunk.

3.1 Informations at the start of the project (February 2022)

Known reported issues on project origin:

  • in 5.4: 425 (126 in T&A that are not processed in the group.)
  • in 5.3: 234
  • without version number: 294

Distribution of values per component for the set of reports in ILIAS 5.4  |  Status 18 February 2022

3.2 Results at the end of the investigation (in August 2022)

  • 191 of the checked issues still exist  »  approximately 45%  of 425 (Issues reportet in ILIAS 5.4 and reproducable in ILIAS 7)
  • More than 200 issues have been fixed in the meantime.
  • Even 615 issues older than 5.3.99 have been closed – only issues that still exist have been reopened and retested in maintained versions.

3.3 Additional Results

  • Bugs are open for far too long and are increasingly only dealt with when they are prioritised. This also applies to new features where problems are even detected in the beta phase.
  • Bugs are often not dealt with even when a JourFixe decision has been made.
  • Further results regarding the optmisation of Mantis
    • "Reported Version" should become mandatory field in Mantis. (Has been done)
    • Issues should contain several reported versions and also several versions with fixes »» Improvements for release notes

3.4 Status procedure (since July 2022)

  • Achievement Status (23.02.2023)
    • 115 Issues that are to be "Refinement funded" and are tagged accordingly in Mantis.
    • 73 Issues resolved, 8 Issues closed
    • 6 Issues with open PullRequests or in Review
  • Task Status (23.02.2023)
    • 135 open Issues validated by the working group
  • In addition, security issues are being tackled.

Increase in Mantis Reports

The time for each 2000 new reports is more and more shortened.

Mantis-ID

Date Submitted

Diff in Days per 2000 Issues

ILIAS Version

#1

16.01.04

–

–

#2000

31.08.06

958

3.6.5

#4000

16.10.08

777

3.10.2

#6000

09.05.10

570

4.0.5

#8000

11.10.11

520

4.2.0

#10000

25.10.12

380

4.2.0

#12000

05.11.13

376

4.3.5

#14000

23.09.14

322

5.0.0

#16000

26.05.15

245

5.0.1

#18000

19.02.16

269

5.1.2

#20000

19.12.16

304

5.1.7

#22000

13.11.17

329

5.3.0

#24000

12.11.18

364

5.4.0

#26002

28.08.19

289

5.4.5

#28000

27.03.20

212

5.4.9

#30001

08.02.21

318

5.4.17

#32000

04.02.22

361

7.6

#34000

26.08.22

203

8.0

#36000

23.12.22

119

8.0

#38000

19.09.23

270

9.0 α

#40000

19.01.24

123

9.0 α

#42000

03.09.24

229

8.14

Mantis Issues from #1 to #36.000

   

There is still a lot to do.

ILIAS Version

Reported Issues [1]

Open Issues [2]

Status Date

Comment

5.3

1315

—

06.10.2021

The key values are unreliable because there were some reports without a version number. The real values will be a little higher.

5.4

1565

—

06.10.2021

same as above

6

1855

460

05.03.2023

7

2406

1014

05.03.2023

This value is heightened because issues from earlier versions were transferred to ILIAS 7 during retesting.

8

3753

734

05.03.2023

3.5 Further procedure (since September 2023)

  • Service providers were contacted to provide funded bug fixing for existing releases (fixing was often requested upwards from ILIAS 7 or 8).
  • Fixes by maintainers or pull requests by other developers
  • Achievement Status (01.09.2023)
    • 220+ Issues that are to be "Refinement funded" and are tagged accordingly in Mantis.
    • 130+ Issues are resolved and 20+ are closed
    • 10+ Issues with open PullRequests or in Review
  • Task Status to ILIAS 6 (30.08.2023)
    • 462 open issues are known at the end of life of ILIAS 6.
    • 85 Issues are retested since EOL and only 41 was not reproducible or fixed in the meantime. The other way about 44 have therefore still been valid.
    • On average, about 45% of the unprocessed or non-finalised issues are still valid in the system. The project deals with these and tries to have them resolved.

3.6 What next ?

  • Quality assurance (Re-Testing and Fixing) needs Ressources
  • More People @ Re-Testers
  • More Time @ Re-Testers
  • More Time @ Developers
  • More Funding @ Developers

4 Funding Support

  • Hochschule Bremen
  • Fachhochschule Bielefeld
  • ILIAS open source e-Learning e.V. (via Budget of Advisory Council)
  • Universität Bern
  • Universität Hannover
  • Katholische Hochschule NRW
  • Universität Bonn

If you would like to participate, please contact

Samoila, Oliver [oliver.samoila] and Strassner, Denis [dstrassner].

5 Involved Service Provider

  • Concepts and Training
  • Databay
  • Leifos
  • Kergomard
  • neusta infomantis
  • sr solutions

6 General Discussion

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], 21 FEB 2022: Samoila, Oliver [oliver.samoila] and Strassner, Denis [dstrassner] presented the project at the Big Projects Jour Fixe and answered questions.

  • Relevance for strategic ILIAS development: Promotes acceptance in everyday life when even the small bugs are fixed; confirms bug reporters when their bug reports are also addressed.
  • Plan for ILIAS 9: Prioritise the bugs and work through them.
  • Chance of realisation: Project can be done in small steps, possible co-financing by advisory board; time for bug fixing must be available with maintainer.
  • Dependencies: none
  • Impact on other development activities: none

Statement Technical Board, 2022 Apr 6: We strongly endorse the goal to reduce the number of issues and improve the workflow around tackling them. However, we believe this to be an effort to be worked on continuously. Since we believe this to be a necessary task for all future versions of ILIAS, we do not give this special priority for the next ILIAS version. However, we fully support and endorse activities around it for ALL upcoming ILIAS versions. Since we believe “ILIAS Refinement” to be a continuous project, we should take care to only support measures that we have the capacity to sustain for all releases in years to come.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], 27 NOV 2023 : Oliver presented the planned steps of this projects for ILIAS 10. Additional testers would be highly appreciated to identify still existing issues in newer ILIAS versions. In case of interest please contact Oliver or Denis.

We strongly endorse the goal to reduce the number of issues and improve the workflow around tackling them. However, we believe this to be an effort to be worked on continuously. Since we believe this to be a necessary task for all future versions of ILIAS, we do not give this special priority for the next ILIAS version. However, we fully support and endorse activities around it for ALL upcoming ILIAS versions. Since we believe “ILIAS Refinement” to be a continuous project, we should take care to only support measures that we have the capacity to sustain for all releases in years to come. We see that this project can and should be considered whenever a component is updated or expanded.

Statement UX/UI/A11y-Experts, 6 DEC 2023

Refinement can help to ensure that important but still open issues are not forgotten/lost in the mass of issues. Prioritizing and fixing issues that are still present in current versions contributes to code quality. We therefore welcome this Big Development Project and would give this a prioritization level 3.

The product manager sees the refinement of the ILIAS code less as a big project but more as a fundamental approach to ILIAS software development. It is a big project with an open end, so to speak. However, in order to give the necessary attention to the ongoing handling of outstanding bug reports, it makes sense to tackle the refinement initiative as part of our Big Projects.

[1] (all status)
[2] (without resolved & closed)

Last edited: 18. Oct 2024, 17:38, Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel]