Suggested Revision of Guideline Handling

1 Description

Guidelines in ILIAS are very important to improve the usability and to streamline the functions and interfaces. They help developers to implement new features easily and to do this according to the user's usability expectations.

At the time being (August 2014), guidelines are suggested, edited and published in the Feature Wiki. But effective guidelines (decided by Jour Fixe) do not appear in the Development Guide (which is the relevant document for ILIAS developers).

• Suggestion 1: Guidelines that have been approved by the Jour Fixe will be published in the Development Guide in the corresponding  chapters/pages if available. A new "Guideline Log" page will be added to the DevGuide that lists all guidelines chronologically and link to the respective pages where the guideline is embedded.

Due to a missing alternative, pages with suggested guidelines currently use the page template for feature requests. IMHO guideline pages need a different structure.

• Suggestion 2: Guideline pages should use the following structure:
  1. Guideline
     • Title "Suggested Guideline" until guideline is approved
     • Optional subchapter for examples
  2. Status
     • Effective from release: { not approved yet | x.y }
     • Approved by Jour Fixe at: { link to Jour Fixe agenda }
       
     • Implementation status: { implemented completely | partly implemented | needs implementation }
     • Funding for streamlining existing features: { name of organisation }
     • Implementation of guideline: { all developers | name of responsible developer }
  3. Components that are not compliant with guideline
  4. Discussion (as usual)

At the time being, we are scheduling a guideline for a selected major relase and looking for money to implement the guideline. If we do not get a funding, we are postponing the guideline. But IMHO we can decide upon a guideline, schedule it for all new features of an upcoming major release and keep it even if we do not have a funding for implementing the guideline in existing components.

• Suggestion 3: Guidelines may become effective even when no funding is available for streamlining existing features.

2 Status

• Scheduled for: Not scheduled yet
• Implementation by: Matthias Kunkel

3 Additional Information

Contact the following persons if you want to know more about this feature, its implementation or funding:

• Information about concept and implementation: Matthias Kunkel

4 Discussion

JF 28 Aug 2014: We appreciate this process. Guidelines in the DevGuide will be added to corresponding existing chapters/pages if available. A new "Guideline Log" page will be added to the DevGuide that lists all guidelines chronologically and link to the respective pages where the guideline is embedded.