Mambo Developer

Mambo Development Lifecycle

In the development cycle we go through several phases and each phase involves specific tasks that must be completed. Progress through the different phases involves all the teams within Team Mambo. Some phases also directly involve Mambo users and the wider Mambo community.

The first phase is the concept stage.

This phase is defined by the roadmap. The roadmap is a planning document that describes the long-term goals of the Mambo Project. The roadmap is a guide to the future of the project and can change at any time.

The process of updating the roadmap is led by the Project Leader. Concepts and ideas can come from any source, including members of Team Mambo, forum users, community feedback, Mambo user groups, industry, in fact, from anyone who suggests an idea for improvement or change.

The Project Leader delegates the task of drafting the roadmap to someone within Team Mambo. The draft is then discussed amongst the team. Collaborative "brain storming" sessions are sometimes held. As a result of this feedback, the roadmap is then refined, approved, and published for everyone to see.

Have a look at the current roadmap here.

Define

Updating the roadmap leads us into the second phase of the development lifecycle. We define the goals and set our targets for the next release. It is the planning stage.

Design

The third stage is where we work through the architectural, logical and technical designs and get stuck in to writing the code. We implement the changes that have been set down in the roadmap and undertake any necessary refactoring of the code. Community input into this phase is limited. We take care to preserve backward compatibility as much as possible, keeping in mind that many of our Mambo users rely upon 3^rd party extensions for additional functionality. Throughout this phase, the Core Team developers tend to test the code as it is changed, usually before changes are committed to the SVN.

The team works closely with 3PD’s throughout this phase of development to provide all necessary information and support to enable 3PD’s to update their extensions where necessary or to feed back any problems they encounter with the code changes.

Testing

At this phase we move from straight programming towards testing and documentation. From a development perspective, focus shifts from implementation to stabilisation. At this point community input is extremely important and we increase our outwards communication towards third party developers. Together we analyse and solve bugs, improve performance and fine tune our code where necessary. From this point on, no new features are added to the code.

Note: testing does not always involve a public beta or release candidate. For Mambo 4.6.2, we distributed a pre-release version specifically for a "bug stomp". With minor versions of Mambo testing is usually done by the team along with some third party developers who wish to test the code.

Stabilisation Phase

During this phase the final bugs are taken care of any the code is prepared for release. As the team works through the bug fixes, testing continues amongst team members to ensure nothing breaks and no new bugs are accidentally introduced.

The team works to ensure all outstanding tracker artefacts are completed for the particular version and that the code is secure and performing correctly.